[Lingtyp] syntactic construction formula

[Christian Lehmann]

Hi Steve,
> On Sun, 20 Dec 2020, 16:45 Christian Lehmann, 
> <christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de 
> <mailto:christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de>> wrote:
>
>     Let the adverb /suddenly/ be my component C. Combined with the
>     construction /John screamed/, my formula might look something like:
>
>     {Adv} NP {Adv} VP {Adv}
>
>     Is this a misleading use of curly brackets (referring to Ian Joo's
>     suggestion, which I remember having seen in the early days of
>     transformationalism) ? Or is there a more adequate representation?
>
> This would allow 0, 1, 2 or 3 'suddenly's, e.g.
>
> "suddenly John suddenly screamed suddenly"...

Are you talking about an established interpretation of { } ? Otherwise, 
I would answer that yours is a standard interpretation of

(Adv) NP (Adv) VP (Adv)

(which is, of course, no construction of English). On the other hand, I 
would, of course, define the suggested use of {X} to mean 'one 
occurrence of X in any of the positions so marked'.

-- 

Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
Rudolfstr. 4
99092 Erfurt
Deutschland

Tel.: 	+49/361/2113417
E-Post: 	christianw_lehmann at arcor.de
Web: 	https://www.christianlehmann.eu

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