Adverbs in Lakhota

[Shannon West]

----- Original Message -----
From: ROOD DAVID S <rood at spot.Colorado.EDU>
To: <siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU>
Sent: December 13, 1999 1:15 PM
Subject: Re: Adverbs in Lakhota


> 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.

Right, I understand that the word order can yield this reading, but that
there are three different readings that can arise.  I meant to show that the
structure of the sentence above yields the reading I gave, but that there
are other structures for the other readings.

> > > 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.

Downward movement is difficult.  It's actively disallowed by some, and used
carefully by others.  I try to avoid it for the simple reason that I don't
want to have to justify it in every paper I write.  I think an upward
movement will still work in this, without having to extract anything from
the CP, and still accounting for Topic being immediately preverbal.   To be
honest, I don't love GB, but I'm temporarily stuck with it.

> Hope this doesn't spoil what you thought you had figured out.

*smile*  No, I don't think so.  I think we just weren't understanding what
the other was saying.  It's hard to explain when I can't draw a tree to
illustrate what I mean.

Thanks.
Shannon