Genetic Descent

[Larry Trask]

--On Friday, June 8, 2001 5:25 pm -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

I'm still too busy to reply to this long posting in detail, so I'll have to
settle for responding to just a few points.

[on the supposed centrality of verbs]

> DLW:  You seem to be repeatedly missing some basic points here.  Not only
> is there a good case to be made for the proposition that verbs are more
> fundamental ("higher") than nouns,

Why?  I have yet to see any convincing argument that this is so.  Anyway,
even if it *were* so, the centrality of verbs is an entirely different
matter from the supposed centrality of verbal morphology.  Elsewhere in
this very posting, you have taken me to task for arguing that you were
confusing lexical verbs with verbal morphology -- and yet here you are,
apparently doing the same thing again.

> but there are some mixed nominal
> morphologies, whereas there are no mixed verbal morphologies.

This remains to be established, I'm afraid.  "I can't cite any" is not the
same thing as "There are none."  For that matter, I can't name too many
languages with mixed nominal morphology, either.

>> LT:  I'm sorry, but I cannot agree that verbs are more basic than nouns.
>> This seems to me an arbitrary fiat.  Anyway, I've never seen a language
>> without nouns, and that suggests to me that nouns are about as basic as
>> anything can be in languages.

> DLW:  It is not a matter of what is or is not basic in some binary sense,
> but of what is more basic in the sense of being higher in the tree.  Nouns
> depend on verbs, not the other way around.

First, this is once again an argument about lexical verbs, and not about
verbal morphology.  I still think you are confusing the two badly.

Second, why is the verb "higher in the tree"?  I have already pointed out
that such a configuration is not a piece of truth, but only an analytical
stance, and not even a stance adopted by most syntacticians.

Thid, in what sense do nouns "depend on verbs"?  The central property of
verbs -- indeed, virtually the definition of verbs -- is that they
intrinsically require nominal arguments.  Nominals, in contrast, do not
intrinsically require verbs.  How does this lead to your conclusion?

>> LT:  I am not a Chomskyan, but I don't think it can simply
>> be taken for granted that the verb is the head of the sentence.

> DLW: It is not being taken for granted.  It is in effect part of what is
> being posited:  "if we assume that verbs are more basic than nouns .."

Er -- what?  If we assume that verbs are more basic than nouns, then we are
simply assuming the conclusion you are trying to establish.

> By
> they way, the Chomskyite "INFL" (if they are still doing that:  I know
> little and care less) is historically descended from the inflection of the
> verb, so their position too would have to be that verbal inflection (in
> this case finite) is more basic.

Well, I'm not a Chomskyan, and I don't care for Chomskyan analyses, but I
don't think this is a fair summary of the Chomskyan position.

First, the Chomskyan I (= INFL) is emphatically not verbal in nature: in
particular, it is not a projection of V(erb).

Second, only *some* verbal morphology (in English) is assigned to I, while
the rest is assigned to the verb.  Chomskyan theory makes a sharp
distinction between the two kinds of morphology, even though -- in English
-- they all surface on the verb.

Third, the Chomskyans considered it a great vindication of their analysis
when Ken Hale reported that the Australian language Walbiri has an overt
'auxiliary' constituent in every sentence which carries much of the
morphology attached to verbs in other languages but which is wholly
non-verbal in nature.

Fourth, in English, most of the verbal morphology is attached to
auxiliaries when these are present -- but, for the Chomskyans, auxiliaries
are emphatically not verbs.

I'm afraid the Chomskyan stance offers no support for David White's
position, and it is out of order to argue that the Chomskyans are "really"
embracing a position which they are manifestly, and very explicitly, not
embracing.

On all this, see any textbook account of Chomskyan syntax.  I've just
consulted pp. 303-313 of Andrew Radford (1988), Transformational Grammar,
CUP -- which, in spite of its odd title, is a textbook of Chomsky's
Principles and Parameters approach.

>> LT:  There is also a fascinating counter-argument here.  Consider this
>> example:
>
>>   'That Martians are green is well known.'
>
>> Now, the subject of 'is' is plainly the complement clause 'That Martians
>> are green'.  Fine.  Now, what is the head of this clause?  Is it the
>> verb, as David seems to be implying?  Then the head of the subject is
>> 'are'.  But -- whoops -- this is plural, and yet the whole clause takes
>> singular agreement.
>> Oh, dear. ;-)
>
> DLW:  This is not so fascinating, or problematic.  It is fairly easy to
> say that the subject of the verb is "that", which would explain why it
> cannot, in such cases, be deleleted.

It may be "fairly easy", but it's wrong.

I know of no syntactician anywhere, of whatever persuasion, who takes the
complementizer of a sentential subject as the subject of the matrix verb.
I presume this suggestion boils down to the proposal that the
complementizer should be taken as the head of the complement clause -- but
I don't know anybody who endorses that, either.

Moreover, the argument from undeletability fails.  Consider another example:

  She realizes (that) Martians are green.

Here the complementizer can readily be deleted.  So, by David's account,
'that' cannot be the head of the complement clause in this case, even
though it is in the other case.  And this is incoherent.

Finally, this whole argument sems to me to clash badly with David's
insistence that the verb is "higher" than anything else.

>> LT:  It is true that, in *some* languages, a sentence may consist
>> entirely of an affixed verb.  But it is equally true that, in *some*
>> languages, a sentence may consist entirely of nominal elements, with no
>> verb-form present at all.
>
> DLW:  There is no _type_ of language where the subject noun and its
> mandatorily associated elements (which would include tense) form a
> complete sentence.  And except for cases of BE-deletion (which only
> occurs in the present), adjetives that serve as (and are marked as)
> verbs, and NPs uttered when context makes clear what the higher VP would
> be, I venture to doubt the validity of your assertation.

OK; let's look.

First, what on earth do you mean by "type of language"?  What is a type of
language?  Who decides what types there are?  Who decides on what basis
languages should be assigned to types?  And why should we believe anything
he says?

Second, what is "BE-deletion"?  Many languages have no copula at all.  So
why should we speak of "deletion" when the copula predictably fails to show
up?

Third, consider Turkish.  Here are some entirely typical Turkish sentences.
In Turkish, the third-singular marker is zero, while the past-tense marker
is <-(y)di>, with vowel harmony; the variable <y> appears after a vowel but
not after a consonant.  This is true whether or not the tense-marker is
attached to a verb.

  Ali hazIr  'Ali is ready'

This consists of <Ali> plus <hazIr> 'ready', with no verbal element at all.

Now try it in the past:

  Ali hazIrdI  'Ali was ready'

Here the past-tense suffix <-dI> has been attached directly to the
adjective, and there is still no verb.

  Ali evde  'Ali is at home'

The second word is <ev> 'house' plus <-de> Locative.  No verb.  In the past:

  Ali evdeydi  'Ali was at home'

Again, the tense-marker goes onto the nominal, and there is no verb.

(These examples do not represent the only possible constructions in
Turkish, but they do illustrate the ordinary and unmarked constructions.)

Now, I have no idea whether these facts qualify Turkish for some particular
"type" of language, but they're still facts.  Who needs verbs when you can
put the tense-marking onto nouns or adjectives?  And why are Turkish facts
less important than the facts of some other (unidentified) languages with
other kinds of sentence structure?

[LT]

>> What David White is arguing, successfully or not, is that the *lexical
>> verb* plays a central role in sentence structure.  Even if we grant
>> this, it *does not follow* that verbal morphology is somehow more
>> central than any other morphology, such as nominal morphology.  Verbal
>> morphology is not the same thing as a lexical verb.

> DLW:  This is a point you yourself seem to miss, in attributing to me
> beliefs about lexical verbs which were intended to apply only to verbal
> morphology.

But, just above, you have twice again appealed expressly to verbs, and not
to morphology.

Sorry, folks: gotta go now.  A pile of work beckons.  Sigh.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
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