hypercorrection/grammatical evolution (was: murky days)

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Thursday, March 28, 2002 12:56 pm -0500 Laurence Horn
<laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:

> Notice that again we're talking about single words here either.  I
> thought McCawley's claim had more to do with blocking lexical items
> whose derivation would violate syntactic constraints (in particular
> Ross constraints), e.g. a word that would mean 'to kiss a girl who is
> allergic to' or 'to drink coffee and'.  As others pointed out, this
> is hard to test because of different paraphrase possibilities.  One
> example I remember being brought up was 'to cuckold', which
> could--although it doesn't have to--be regarded as derived from 'to
> have sex with the wife of', thereby violating the complex NP
> constraint.

Yep, I know it's supposed to be about single words, but what does this mean
for approaches which claim a continuum between lexicon and grammar?  Do
single words still have special status?

(Lynne and Larry go off on a tangent again...)

Lynne

Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
Acting Director, MA in Applied Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320