16.3239, Review: General Ling/Ling Theories: Mufwene et al. (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-3239. Wed Nov 09 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.3239, Review: General Ling/Ling Theories: Mufwene et al. (2005)

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1)
Date: 08-Nov-2005
From: Sanford Steever < sbsteever at yahoo.com >
Subject: Polymorphous Linguistics: Jim McCawley's Legacy 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 09 Nov 2005 20:10:18
From: Sanford Steever < sbsteever at yahoo.com >
Subject: Polymorphous Linguistics: Jim McCawley's Legacy 
 

EDITORS: Mufwene, Salikoko; Francis, Elaine J.; Wheeler, Rebecca S.
TITLE: Polymorphous Linguistics
SUBTITLE: Jim McCawley's Legacy
PUBLISHER: MIT Press
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1403.html 

Sanford B. Steever, unaffiliated scholar

OVERVIEW

James D. McCawley (1938-1999) is well-known for his many 
contributions to phonology, syntax, semantics, linguistic logic and the 
philosophy of science, not to mention the arts of cuisine and music. 
While most linguists know his work primarily through his writings, he 
also exerted a strong influence on the field through his teaching. In at 
least two well-known cases, these two currents of his work coincided 
in his two big textbooks, "Everything that linguists always wanted to 
know about logic, but were ashamed to ask" (McCawley 1981) 
and "The syntactic phenomena of English" (McCawley 1998), both of 
which took shape in classrooms at the University of Chicago as Jim 
sought to find textbooks that he could comfortably use without 
continual caveats or heavy annotation.

This commemorative volume includes 22 contributions of linguists who 
studied with him and whose work was shaped to some degree or 
other by him. Their exposure to Jim's teaching ranges from taking 
courses with him at an LSA summer Linguistic Institute to having him 
as their primary dissertation advisor at Chicago.

As a matter of disclosure, I studied with Jim at the University of 
Chicago, where he chaired my dissertation committee. Further, I am 
also acquainted with half of the contributors to this volume, either as a 
friend, a student, a classmate, a coeditor, a coauthor, or, in one case, 
a roommate.

SYNOPSIS

The volume begins with an appreciation of Jim McCawley as a scholar 
and teacher, written by Salikoko Mufwene (xi-xvi), followed by a list of 
Jim's publications (xvii-xxx). This is followed by the editors' 
Introduction (1-23), which attempts to place the individual chapters in 
the context of Jim's work and teaching. The volume is divided into six 
parts: Phonology; Syntax; Tense, Aspect, and Mood; Semantics and 
Pragmatics; Knowledge of Language; and Encyclopedia and 
Language.

At a time and in a discipline when much linguistic theory was 
expressed in terms of, and exemplified by, English, Jim inspired his 
students to look for linguistic insights in other languages. This volume 
includes discussions of linguistic phenomena in Bangla (1 article), 
Burmese (1), Hindi (2), Hungarian (1), Japanese (4), Korean (2), 
Lingala (1), Tamil (2) Zuni (1). In fact, when English phenomena are 
analyzed in this volume, it is often by a scholar for whom English is a 
non-first language (e.g., Mufwene, Farkas).

Timothy Vance's "Sequential voicing and Lyman's Law in Old 
Japanese" (27-43), the only phonology paper in the volume, leads off 
the set of 22 papers. It explores the history of sequential voicing, or 
rendaku, in Japanese. Based on historical evidence, Vance shows 
that, instead of a single bidirectional constraint, two separate 
phonological processes are subsumed under this phenomenon.

E. Annamalai discusses two kinds of motivations in "NP gaps in Tamil: 
syntactic versus pragmatic" (47-68). Some gaps in Tamil are shown to 
be syntactically motivated (and recoverable), while others prove to be 
pragmatically motivated. While the correlation between syntactic vs. 
pragmatic motivation with certain definable structures is not absolute, 
syntactic motivation appears to be unmarked for intrasentential gaps 
while pragmatic motivation is unmarked for extrasentential, or 
discourse, gaps.

Michael Shapiro's paper "Vaacya, prayoga, and Hindi sentences 
without grammatical subjects" (69-82) argues that two concepts from 
the indigenous Hindi grammar tradition can help us make sense of a 
variety of "subjectless" sentences in Hindi. This paper ably exemplifies 
Jim McCawley's "consumerist" approach to ideas about linguistic 
analysis (see Lawler 2003).

Harold Schiffman's "The grammaticalization of aspect in Tamil and its 
semantic sources" (pp.83-107) invokes both metaphor and 
grammaticalization to explain certain auxiliary constructions in Tamil. 
This chapter is a version of the author's paper, "The role of metaphor 
in the grammaticalization of aspect in Tamil," presented at the 
American Anthropological Association, Chicago, November 1999. 
Having just published a book on the Tamil auxiliary system (Steever 
2005), I can offer two remarks. First, the appeal to "metaphor" to 
explain the development of auxiliary structures appears to be neither 
sufficient nor necessary. It is not sufficient because the English 
translation of a metaphor that putatively motivates an auxiliary 
structure in Tamil does not do so in English and so must be language- 
or structure-dependent; it is not necessary because more prosaic 
linguistic factors can be shown to explain auxiliary structures (Steever 
1993). Second, while grammaticalization is inherently a diachronic 
process, Schiffman presents no historical evidence in support of its 
operation in Tamil. True, the sandhi rules of Modern Tamil permit the 
pronunciation of the auxiliary compound verb vantu viTTaarkaL 'they 
did-2 come-1' as vantiTTaanka 'id.', but the word-formation rules of 
the language still motivate a segmentation of the latter into two words 
with as many word and morpheme boundaries as the former so this 
alternation is synchronic, not diachronic

Tista Bagchi's "Causation and tense in subordinate clauses: 
conjunctive participles and conditionals in Bangla and Hindi" (109-
134) explores the interaction of unaccusativity and ergativity with 
tense and causation in the formation of subordinate clauses in Bangle 
and Hindi. This chapter contributes to the extensive literature on the 
syntactic characterization of conjunctive verb forms in the South Asian 
linguistic area.

Etsuyo Yuasa's "Independence in subordinate clauses: analysis of 
nonrestrictive relative clauses in English and Japanese" (135-160) 
asks whether McCawley's analysis of English nonrestrictive relative 
clauses as forming discontinuous constituents with their heads can be 
applied to Japanese. An answer in the affirmative is provided by 
several syntactic arguments, showing that Jim's analysis can naturally 
explain similar phenomena in languages as typologically different as 
English (non-SVO, in Jim's terms) and Japanese (SOV). 

Elaine J. Francis' "Syntactic mimicry as evidence for prototypes in 
grammar" (161-181) extends McCawley's claim that syntactic 
categories are not bundles of discrete syntactic features, but 
prototypes that reflect syntactic, semantic, morphological and possibly 
other dimensions of linguistic structure. Demonstrations such as this 
suggest that strict X-bar theories need to be viewed more critically and 
constructed more flexibly if they are to reflect actual linguistic 
phenomena.

Geoffrey Huck's "Gerundive modifiers in English and Korean" (183-
201) studies differences in absolute and relative gerundive modifiers 
in English and Korean. He proposes to extend Na's (1991) restriction 
on Korean relative clauses (the Thematic Well-formedness Condition) 
to the analysis of gerundive modifiers, which in some early analyses 
appeared to be highly reduced relative clauses. 

Yoko Sugioka's "Multiple mechanisms underlying morphological 
productivity" (203-223) explores deverbal compounds in Japanese 
and discovers a distinction between processes that exhibit rule-like 
behavior and others that do not, attempting to relate them to a 
distinction between a mental rule (that obviates the need to store 
individual derivatives) and memory (which allows such storage).

Salikoko Mufwene's "How many be-s are there in English" (226-246) 
takes one of McCawley's arguments for auxiliaries a step further, 
claiming that copular "be" is transformationally inserted rather than 
base-generated, and therefore resembles auxiliary "be." This unites 
the copular, existential and auxiliary uses of the word under a single 
banner.

Robert Binnick's "On McCawley on Tense" (249-260) provides a 
thoughtful critique of McCawley on the semantics of tense. From 
McCawley's celebrated analysis of the English present perfect, which 
he contrasts with an early analysis of Partee's, Binnick attempts to 
educe a more general treatment of verbal tense and aspect.

Wesley Jacobsen's "On the fuzzy boundary between tense and 
aspect in Japanese" (261-282) argues against some traditional 
grammarians that Japanese does in fact have tense. He notes that 
under certain circumstances and in certain settings, temporal notions 
coalesce as tense (including relative tense, or taxis) while in others 
they coalesce as aspect.

Lynn Nichol's "Counterfactuality in Burmese" (283-294) takes up the 
expression of counterfactual conditionals in Burmese. She concludes 
that while one can have a constant semantic characterization of 
counterfactual conditions across languages, the morphosyntactic 
realization of counterfactuality admits a degree of variation. The 
distinction between ordinary and counterfactual conditions in Burmese 
is shown to turn on an attitudinal evaluation of distance between the 
real world and alternative possible worlds.

Suk-Jun Chang's "Retrospective mood in Korean: A constraint-based 
approach" (295-326) presents an analysis of the retrospective verb 
paradigm on Korean, one that has been variously characterized as a 
tense or mood. 

Laurence Horn's "An Un- Paper for the Unsyntactician" (329-365) 
analyzes the increasingly productive word-formation process that 
generates English nouns such as "Un-cola." Perhaps better than any 
other paper in this volume, Horn's captures the sense of delight and 
glee that Jim McCawley could bring to the analysis of some corner of 
language that no one had bothered to spend much time looking at. 
Both scholarly and witty, this paper shows how the semantics of un-
words, as often happens in derivational morphology, can deviate -- in 
predictable ways -- from the basic compositionality of their component 
parts, which is no mean feat.

Donka Farkas' "Semantic noun phrase typology" (368-87) proposes a 
crosslinguistic typology of noun phrases based on a division between 
structural distinctions and what she calls fine distinctions. After 
examining English and Hungarian, she concludes that surface gross 
clausal combinatorics are insensitive to the fine nominal distinctions 
which may be made in semantic analysis.

Almerindo Ojeda's "The Paradox of Mass Plurals" (389-410) proposes 
a framework in which to resolve the paradox presented by mass 
plurals, a conundrum which Jim bequeathed to linguists for analysis. 
His treatment draws upon such different languages as English, 
Lingala and Zuni.

Katharine Beals' "Everything That Linguistics Have Always Wanted to 
Know about Ironic Presupposition and Implicatures but Were Ashamed 
to Ask" (411-429) attempts to tease out the conditions under which 
ironic statements are to be correctly interpreted. She concludes that 
the correct interpretation of irony depends on reference to linguistic 
conventions, not solely on a linguistically independent characterization 
of irony as a rhetorical figure.

William O'Grady's "Deficits in Pronoun Interpretation: Clues to a 
Theory of Competence and Acquisition" (434-454) uses processing 
theory to give actual cognitive substance to the way in which 
pronouns might be interpreted. This suggests that the way in which 
pronouns are interpreted may come under general cognitive 
capacities, rather than a dedicated linguistic faculty.

Jerry Morgan and Georgia Green's "Why Verb Agreement is Not the 
Poster Child for any General Formal Principle" (455-478) notes that 
many theoretical paradigms stake their claims to (partial) explanatory 
competence on their analyses of subject-verb agreement, then 
proceeds to show why such a reliance is misplaced. They 
demonstrate that both verb agreement in English and the linguistic 
generalization(s) that characterize it are far from uniform, requiring 
appeal to as many as five different principles. It would be a worthwhile 
project to apply this kind of analysis to languages where verb 
agreement is more extensively elaborated.

Barbara Luka's "A Cognitively Plausible Model of Linguistic Intuition" 
(479-502) presents a cognitively-based theory in virtue of which 
speakers' linguistic intuitions about their languages may be explained. 
She uses metacognitive attribution and preferences in implicit 
learning, or MAPIL, to help explain how speakers ground conscious 
decisions about their linguistic judgments in implicit memory for 
previously encountered linguistic structures.

Peter Daniels' "Language and Languages in the Eleventh Britannica" 
(505-529) rounds out the volume, providing a glimpse of what an 
educated nonspecialist just before World War I might have known 
about language and languages by surveying the Encyclopedia 
Britannica (1910-11). Although the editors attempted to recruit this 
chapter to the literature on "colonial" (and "postcolonial") critiques of 
language (page 20), it stands on its own as an enjoyable antiquarian 
study (using computer-aided searches) of what "unmarked" 
knowledge about language was available at a time when the sun 
never set on the British Empire.

EVALUATION

This volume succeeds as an able tribute to Jim McCawley's strengths 
as a teacher. These papers, taken collectively, illustrate a number of 
lessons that Jim emphasized in his classroom teaching. His approach 
to language and linguistics lay less with endorsing a specific set of 
theories and more with an inquisitive, penetrating and critical 
approach to the analysis of language. He emphasized a respect for 
the role of meaning in language and its potential to influence syntax; 
downplaying of notational systems and foregrounding of the insights 
that theories might lead to; deep involvement in languages other than 
English, with an emphasis on languages of Asia; and a consumerist 
approach to linguistic ideas and theories. In this last instance, 
particularly, Jim held that the better a consumer and critic one was of 
linguistic theories, the better prepared one would be to create and use 
such theories.

The only noticeable gap in this already rich volume is the lack of a 
chapter that directly takes up one of Jim's main currents of thought, 
Linguistics and the Philosophy of Science. If none of the authors 
tackles it head on, however, the influence of this strand in Jim's work 
is nevertheless apparent in several chapters in the way that the 
authors will draw on multiple, well, polymorphous, approaches to 
language which they can use to express linguistic insights.

Finally, kudos to the MIT Press, the editors, and the copyeditors for 
their meticulous preparation of this volume.

REFERENCES

Lawler, John. 2003. Obituary: James D. McCawley. Language 79:614-
25.

McCawley, James D. 1981. "Everything linguists always wanted to 
know about logic, but were ashamed to ask." Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press.

McCawley, James D. 1988. "The syntactic phenomena of English." 
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Na, Younghee. 1991. Relativizability in Korean. Manuscript, University 
of Toronto.

Steever, Sanford B. 1993. "Analysis to synthesis: the development of 
complex verb morphology in the Dravidian languages." New York: 
Oxford University Press.

Steever, Sanford B. 2005. "The Tamil auxiliary verb system." London: 
Routledge. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Sanford Steever's interests include syntax, morphology and historical 
linguistics, particularly as they occur in the Dravidian languages. His 
book, "The Tamil auxiliary verb system," released this summer, is 
dedicated to three scholars, including Jim McCawley.





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