Adverbs in Lakhota

ROOD DAVID S rood at spot.Colorado.EDU
Mon Dec 13 21:15:19 UTC 1999


Shannon, one more point where things are not quite as simple as we might
wish:
> > > Ahh, so if the NP subject is at the beginning of the sentence it is
> outside
> > > of the embedded clause.  I.e. this is not correct:  [John a tub this
> morning
> > > he bought] he-told-me.
> >
> > Not exactly.  They're both possible. In the sequence NP NP V V,
> > you can get either [[NP NP V]  V] or [NP [NP V] V], assuming that the
> > first NP is a possible subject for either verb.
>
> Okay.  So in [John a tub this morning he bought] he-told-me, John and he are
> not the same person.  Forgive my dense head on this, pronominal co-reference
> is not my cup of tea.


	I don't think your conclusion here is right.  It is exactly this
word order  from which we can get the "he" of "he told me" to be an
anaphor with John as the anteceent.  It's not "bound" in the GB sense, any
more than is the "he" in the English "sentence" I gave once before: John
bought a bathtub this morning; he told me that.


> >
> > I have trouble with the notion of "extraction" in this kind of
> > grammatical theory, because as I've been trying to say in my muddled way,
> > I don't think there's any "movement' involved.  Given NP NP V V, the first
> > NP can be the subject of either verb.  If it's the subject of the first
> > verb, then it can be referred back to pronominally by the second, but if
> > it's the subject of the second verb only, then it's not a constituent of
> > the embedded sentence.  So we can get the following without movement:
> > John [ (he) bathtub bought] said
> > [John bathtub bought] (he) said

	What I didn't make clear, I guess, is that I think (again, better
verify with speakers if possible) that the "he" in parentheses in those
paraphrases can be either John or someone else in both sentences, either
separately or at the same time.  In other words, without inversion, there
are three readings to this sentence:
	John said John bought a bathtub this morning.
	John said X bought a bathtub this morning.
	X said John bought a bathtub this morning.
	
	But the one you started with, where "John" is inside the
complement clause, can only be a "transformation" of the third reading,
and the "transformation" is not the extraction of "bought" and/or "this
morning" from the embedded sentence, but the "inversion" of the focus
transformation which has put "John" in preverbal position inside its
clause.  I don't know how you do inversion in GB "downward" -- maybe you
don't.  I have to re-learn the relationships between spec and comp and
head every time I read a paper in this model, it's all so unintuitive for
me.
	Hope this doesn't spoil what you thought you had figured out.
	Best,
	David



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