Pragmatic observations on the active-passive controversy

journal of Pra~ati~s 2 (1978) 331-359 @ ~~rth-Ho~nd Pubfishing Company

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~snents that have beern .;jdvarwd by Katz and liis associates in support of thek contention that semantic interpretation rules for actives and passives need only refer to their deep sy~~~t~~ rt:iprt~sc!nrtation,s. Zt is shown that both arguments suffer from a f~~ure to do justice to certain esw 1ti9 properties oC,1inl;uistic expressions that are inherent :n+a.,,*~P:...* ,*.......t....* _.-.a AL..+ to t$-eir statueu rrir Ub a ir@wrrm +a irr#%rn..m:nnI:U* Js~“IIIwn,P UI + cI *I> Dk lrVlIlmUlllwaLlVrli SI ILci‘l ~~.I.IUll~_,&-4*LWGGll qJGtlK’G1~ a11u LIIbH hearers. In this rerspect, the arguments in question lend support to the: general plea, that is being made for an approach to linguistic wmantics in which lungujsts base their theories cwn*pragmatic occurrences’ of linguistic expressions i:- they can be obwrwd in the wtual use of language by a speaker and his audience rather than on ‘exhibitory cccurrwces’, the type of illuskative occurrence that can only be observed in lwblications about language and that comes close to being totally devoid ot’ meaning.

e early ~i~~~~~~ of’ the swalkd KatzPostal hypothesis, which claizned that syntactic dee :, ‘5 ires A la CCmsky pro3 sentences ihat might vided a sufficient basis for the sctmantic interpretatisn be assumed to derive from them, It was this hypothl!sis that had formed the fundamental assumption underlying ihe intel;g;:lted theory of linguistic description as y Katz and Postal I[1!Y64), in which an aut~3nomou5syntactic lzomponent been sketched in C~~omsky~[1!?57)was :iupplemc:ntedwith an interprec component of the 1ype proposed in Ka~~z and Fodor (1963). ect, the most sur;xl sing thing about thg hypothesis in ques:tion is not that it has failed, 5ut that it has “MXXI put fc!lrw :d at 111, and that it took SOlong for This paper dwells on twoI episodes in

* ~~~~ar~~ for this axtide has bw wrdad INUI uade t prcject IV. I O-10 of the Netherlands ~~fgan~at~o~ for the Advancemewa c F Pure Rwwr~:h (;Z!VQ . I’l,nea,Mr version has appeared as report nr. fC0.211 JS from the I ns,iWe for cognitive: reseuch, Univexsity of Anrsterdam,in F’ebFumy1977.

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$2.Schoorl /Obsmvationson activesand passives

its failure to become apparent. According to Barbara Hall ParteL, the explanation for this is to be found in the “surprising historical accident” that “tlhe behavior of

quantifiers was not really noticed until the Katz-Postal hypothesis had for most linguists reached the status of a necessary condition on writing rules”, and she doubts if the hypothesis “would have even been suggested” if this behavioilr had been noticed beforehand (Partee 1975 : 655). In the sections that follow I will show that this explanation may very well be correct, even though, as we will see, the proponents of the hypothesis themse!ves were quite awxe of the potentklly problematic nature of sentences containing quantifiers and have tried to argue on at least two occasions that such sentences nevertheless failed to provide decisive evidence against their hypothesis. When Katz and Postal first presented their hypothesis, they did so in order to demonstrate the superiority of autonomous syntax. Ironically enough, their Aypothesis has proved a highly effective weapon in the hands of those who have sought to undermine that autonomy. There is not much point in believing syntax to be autonomous and independent of meaning when the ultimate test for the adequacy of a particular syntactic proposal is to be found in the degree to which it su.pports semantic: analysis. In order to be able to execute this crucial test, linguists need :much deeper insights into the nature of linguistic meaning than autonomous syntax might have ever been able to provide. But when Katz and Fodor presented their outline of a semantic.: theory in linguistics, they still subscribed to the methodological principle [hat a linguistic theory should seek to describe the properties of linguist_ic expressions in complete isolation from their possible se, tii\gs in verbal, social or physical corrtexts (1963. 173). As a result of this isolatior,ism, linguistic research tended to .:oncentrate exclusively on what I would term the zuhibitory uccwrences of linguistic expression s, the type of occurrence that one finds in philosophical or linguistic Tgritings when an author invites his readers to consider a particular expression, or in an experimental set-up when the experimenter produces a given lingu*istic expression as an item, say, to be recalled by the subjects in ;I memory test. As long :IS linguists restricted their attention to syntax pure and, simple, no serious harm was to result from their preoccupation with such exhibitory occurrences, but ~~ncc meaning had come to be acknowledged as a genuine part of the subject matter of linguistics, things were different. To say that something has a meaning is to say that it functions as a symbol of something else. I”n the communicative interaction of a speaker and his hearer linguistic expresslonl; serve as symbols of mental constructs: a mental construct in the brain of the .;peaker which he wishes to make available to his hearer when he es his utterance, and a corresponding men&% construct in the brain of that hearer which forms the result of his having understood that utterance. Such mental constrWcts may be stored in memory for later use and may lead to overt behaviour, verbal or otherwise, on the part of the hearer. Occurrences of linguistic expressions which fulfrl this kind of symbolic function constitute what one might term prag-

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m~tic occurreraces, the kind of occurrence that U,sedr*S of language rather than students of language are familiar with.

Typically, such occurrence:~ are brought a\ out by a speaker who intends to convey a thought, a wish, an emcltion, or any other kind of informational cmnpIex, to his audience, and are understI>oldby the audience to be thus intended. Also, the symbolic function of such. oc Currences requires tha[t there be a conventional and systematic relation between the ex,preszdorrthat is being used and the meaning that is expressed with it. By cant Iat, exhibitory occurrences of linguistic expres:.ions are characterized by the abserlce of such1a communicative intention o.n by the av’areness on the part of his “audience’ that such an g. And alth~ough one cannot prevent some mental construct OI associateci with a particular exhibitory occurrence of a lin the relation between the two is much less conventional and systematic than in the case of :I pragnatic occurrence. ram a_ maema ic point 11f V+JYV i the_n_, eih&itory oecurrerms F_____ ,-_,_-_t__ -_‘_- ____ __& of !@g.&~c expressions are about the clos::st one ca.n get to meaningless occurrences, and such Jccurrences cannot therefore serve as a very useful subject of research for those who want to study the semantic properties of linguistic expressions, nor rriost of their syntactic properties if it comes to that. Given such considerations, the semantic component of a theory which purports to specify the linguistic competence of language users should be looked upon, in effect, as an att.empt to characterize the set of operations or ‘routines’ *whichenable a hearer to decode a given linguistic expression into the mental construct wh.iich the speaker intends to convey to him wi,t.hhis utterance. Correspondingly,, the syntactic component of such a theory must be looloecl upon as a characterization of the set of routines that enable a speaker t~3r,!ncodea given mental construct into a linguistic expression which can serve as an a~ppropriatesyrnboli~~:+t on of that construct. And it is only with what I have termed pragmatic occurrences of’linguistic expressions that this kind of encoding and decoding takes place. IL In wh.at follows, I will ree:cat;nine two arguments by Katz ;andhis associa.testhat have been advanced to suppora the Katz-P’ostalhypothesis with respect to actives and passives, and show that their position cannot be maintained once pragmatic considerations of the: sort presented in tlttis introduction are taken into account. In doing so I may well appear, in the eyes lof some linguists, to indulge in flogging dead horses only, but I have tried to restrict such evil conduct to cases in v&rich ginal rider appears to still be fi,rmly mounted on the corpse,

1 For a more thoroughgo@; tre;itment o,f ths various points made in these paragnqjhs, see Schoorl (in preparation).

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S. Schoorl / Ubswvutionson ctctives and pmsives

std (1964)versusChomsky ( In defence of the autonomy of syntax, Chomsky has pointed out that one can describe circumstcances under which an active sentence like Everyone iti the nxm knows at ltwt two hnguuges is true while the corresponding passive A,r least two languages are known by everyone in the room is false, e.g., if one pel son in room knows only French and German, and another only Spanish and Italian. Chomsky concluded that “‘not even the weakest semmtic relation (factual equivalence) holds in general between active and passive”, g car elusion he must have felt to be SO obvious and beyond dispute that this was all the evidence he provided to support his rejection of one of the “more common assertions put forth as supporting the dependence of grammar on meaning”, the assertion that “an active and the corresponding passive are synonymous” (195’7: 94, 1OO- 1). Since Chonnsky had been assuming that actives and passives should be taken to derive from essentially similar syntactic deep structures, his conclusions regarding such sentences as the above could not be left unchallenged by Katz and Postal when they presente d their claims regarding the sufficiency of syntactic deep structures i la Chomsky for the purposes of semantic iriterpretation. Accordingly, they constructed an argument to show that their hypothesis could be maintained even with respect to apparent counterexamples :like the above, and that, in general, “both actives and passives containing quantifiers and pronouns are ambliguous in the same way and so are full paraphrases of each oth\er” (1964: 72). Their argument centred on the following expressions: (1) (2) (3) (4)

There arc two languages which everyone in the room knows. Eqqeryone in the room knows QWOlanguages. T NO1anQuagesare known by everyone in the room. TZlere are two ReZ languages.

Acting upon the assumption that the structures underlying (2) and (4) are con: tituents of the structure underlying(l), Katz and Postal argued as follows: The argument that in the passive [ 31 the two languages referred to are the same for everyone, while in [ 21 the two languages ate different for different individuals, and hence that [ 2 ] and [3] differ in meaning is disconfiimed, because in [ 1 ] the languages referred to are the same two for everybody and [ 1 J could not have this interprstation if iits constituent [2] did no1 have this meaning as well as the other. This follows because it is clear from the character of the semantic component that a particuhr constituent cannolt have a given reading in a sentcnc’: context unless that reading is one of that constituent’s readings in isolation (1964: 73).

As it stands, this argument is incomplete in at least two respects. otice, first, that since Katz and Postal attempt to prove that (2) and (3:) are full paraphaases of each other, and since they admit that in (2) the languages referred to can be different for different persons, it follows that they should have shown, also,

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that (3) CM be given a readiq under which th.e languages may differ from perwn toI person. Secord, notice that Katz xnd Postal have tried to disprove the claim that for (211 to be true, the t ages have to be different for different persons, However, this is not a claim 1s crucially invoI!ved in the judgements about sentences like (2) arid (3) that have been expressed in Chomsky (1959) and that Katz and Postal1 have made it their task to refute with their argument. For Chomsky, both sentences en the same two languages are known by everybody in the room; different is that (3) unlike (2), is necessarily false when different different pairs of languages. In others words, the crucial assumption omsky’s intuitions in these matters is that sameness of language pair!; is a necessary condition on the truth of sentences like (3) but only a sufficient con. dition on the truth of (2), the latter merely requiring that the number of langldages that are known by the people in the room is two for every one of them. It follows; that o refute this crucial assumption, an argument is required which shows that “--.Wp ~2~s VW.‘_ be assigned to a sentence like (2) under which sameness of language pairs is a necessary condition on its truth. However, all Katz and Postal have shown is that difference of language pairs is not a necessary condition on its truth. In order to make up for Katz and Postal’s first omission, their failure to prove that a sentence like (3) can be given a reading under which different languages may be known by different people,, one might observe that a sentence like cllt least two joints have been snaked by everybody in the mum can be read not only as saying that there were at least two joints that everybody had a few puffs from, but also as saying that two joints, if not more, is the quantity everybody smoked all by himself. Likewise, practically the only way to make sense of At ZetisdoozegZassof Scotch has been consumed by every guest at the party would be to read it as being ’ terpret it as saying that about a different glass of Scotch for every guest and d was one glass. On the for every guest the mijnimum amount of Scotch he or pon (3) on one of its force of such observations, one might be prepared to lu r::adings, ss a variant of (2) and read it as a statement on e linguistic accomplish. ments of the people in the room, a statement which then says, in effect, that everyone in there is bilingual. And for such a statement to be true it is quite unnecessary, of course, for the people in question to know the same two languages. For this reason, the reading under which (3) might be about everyone in the room being bilingual is quite distinct from the reading that lcan be true only in case these people do know the same two language under this latter reading, (3) is about the number of languages that are univers y known by those referred to, and t number cannot ptossibly be two when one person in the room knows only Frenc and German and another knows only French and Spanish. &uso, this number can very well be just two among a gro p of people who each know more th&njust two lx:pagess which is the kind of situation represented in fig. 1. According to this diagrant, Bill and Mary each know as many as four languages; John, Fred and Joan each know three, whereas only two languages, Finnish and En&h, are k.noJvn bY everybody listed in the diagram.

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S. Schoorl / Qbservarimts on actives and passives JOHN

S'ii!AHILX

BILL

FiNNISh;

FRED

ENGLISH

MARY

ITALXAN

JOAN

SPANISH Fig. 1.

Now let us consider the sentences (5) and (6) below in tha light of the state o affairs represented in fig. 1. (5) At !eas? three languages are hewn by everyone.

(6) Only two languages are known by everyone. With respect to the facts represented in fig. 1,211utterance of (5) will be true when we read it as saying that none of the people involved is less than ‘trilingual’, but false when read as saying that the number of languages that is universally known among them is at least three. Under this latter type of reading, (6) is true with respect to the facts of fig. 1 but false when we read it as saying that none of the people in fig. 1 is more than just bilingual. Clearly, then, the various readings that might be associated with these sentences have different truth conditions, which shows that (5) and (6) are truly ambiguous. Now If Katz and Postal’s claim that actives and corresponding passives containing quantifiers are full paraphrases of each other were to be correct, the actives corn responding to (5) and (6) should be equally ambiguous, so that (7) and (8) below should be either ttue or false with respect to the facts of fig. 1 dependent on which reading we choose : (7) Ever;lone knows at least three languages. (8) Everyone knows only two languages. This prediction, however, is not borne out by the facts. The only reading that can be assigned to (7) is the one under which it is true with respect to fig. 1, and it cannot be retid as saying that at least three languages are universally known by those people. Likewise, (8) can only be read as saying that everyone knows two and not more than two languages, a statement that is false with respect to fig. 1, and it cannot be given a reading under which it means that only two languages are universally known by the people listed. Hence, the actives corresponding to (5) and (6) are not ambiguous in the way in which (S) and (6) themselves have been shown to be, which means that Katz and Postal’s claim under discussion cannot be maintained.

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It is important to see how part of the confusion about the alleged ambiguity of sentences like (7)-(8) or (2), an ambiguity that plays such a central role in Katz and Postal’s argument, must be reduced to a confusion of tnrth and sincetity. tz arid Postal a sentence like (21, repeated below for ease of reference, is ambiguous between it being the same two languages for everyone or different languages for different people: (2) Everyone in the room knows two languages. Surely when the facts have it that the Imembers of a part&x&u group of people each hw~ the same tW0 languages, it is 3lso a fact with respect to this group that everyone in it knows two languages. That is, if it is true that they all know English and ese and no language other than these, then since it is true that English and ese are two languages, it has to be true that they all know two languages. However, truth relative to obtaining facts is not the same as sincerity retative to avaiZabZe knowledge. Nor is it a priori clear that it is truth rather than sincerity which is to form the central notion in a semantic theory of natural language which focusses, as such a theory should do, on pragmatic occurrences of linguistic expressions and seeks to defme the app*:opriateness condi;ions which govern such occurrences. To see the difference, let us suppose that one Harry has gone abou t asking everyone in a given room what languages he or she knew, and that the ;Inswsr in each case was ‘ ingli-sh and Portuguese’. If Harry were to report about thia enquiry of his with an UTterarce of (21, we should not say that what he would then be telling his audience was false. On the other hand, since what is being conveyed with such an ed to have asked for and utterance of (2) is not the iufcrqation Harry was su ng been insincere and of to have acquired, we could rightly accuse him of from them. By contrast, having misled his audience by withholding informa there would have been no question of Harry misleading anyone at all if he lhad uttered (2) as a means of conveying the information he would have acquired as a result of a different kind of enquiry, one in which he had gone about asking the very same people how many languages he or she knew, and in which their answer to this question had invariably been ‘two’. Natice how the failure to distinguish sincerity from truth which I think underlies Katz and Postal’s assumption that (2) is ambiguous between whether it is the same two languages for every individual or different languages for different individuals, opens the way to an utterly absurd notion, of ambiguity. Once we let ourselves postulate an ambiguity in (2) on the force of the observation that this expression can be used to make a logically true statement both when the people referred to know the same two languages and when each of them knows a different pair, there is no way to prevent us from ascribing a third reading to it on the basis of the observation that it can also be used to make a true statement in case those people have one language in common and a second one that is unique for each of them. On such

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338

would have every right to claim thalt the sentence Joviniast reading saying ‘Jovinian has died” and a reading saying ‘Jovinian got killed’, a claim we could support with the observation that the sentence can be used to make a statement that is literally true bo Jovinian got killed and when he has died. Likewise, since a sentence like 7Rere are 98 books on that shelf can be used to make a statement that is literally true not only when there are exactly 98 books on that shelf but also in case there are more, tis observation would give us ah the evidence required to support the quite ridicufous claim that such a sentence has as many different readings as there are natural numbers c 2 98. It should be clear, then, that for a inguist to base his judgement of sentence meaning on this literal variety of truth or to postulate an ambiguity on such grounds, would be hardly less foolish than for a courtroom judge to be sat1 with a witness who swears to tell ‘the truth’ but refuses to tell ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’: inside as well as out(zide the witness box a speaker who is aware that the people in a @ven room all ?UIOW the same two languages would be telling the truth, but not the who:Ctruth, if he should utter the sentence Everyone in the room knows two languages. By contrast, no such lack of sincerity can be put down to a speaker who is aware that planes can be dangerous when they are up in the air and who tries to tell his audience of this danger with an utterance of the truly ambiguous sentence Flying planes can be dangerous.

slight

grounds,

also, we

is dead is truly ambiguous between

In further support of my claim that sentences like (2), (7) or (8) do not have a

reading under which they are about the number of languages thst the people referred to have in common, and that such sentences therefore do not have a reading which requires sameness of languages lfor everyone, it might be observed that such a reading cannot even be forced out under contextual pressure. To see this, notice that if we should wish to talk about the state of affairs represented in fig. 1 above and inform our audience that none of the people in question is less than ‘trilingual’ but that there are only two languages that are universally known among them, and if Katz and Postal’s claim were correct that actives like (7) and (8) and their corresponding passives (5) and (6) are ambiguous, and equally so, it should not matter which of he following expressions we would use in order to get that information across to our audience: Everyone knows at least three languages, aithou wo languages are known by everyone. [(7) + (6)] Only two languages are known by everyone, although everyone kxmws at least three languages. [(6) + (7)] At least three. languages are known by everyone, although only two languagesare known by everyone. f(5) + (6)] Only two langua,ges are known by everyone, although at least three Sanguagesare known by everyone. I(6) f (S)]

S. &hoc& / Obsmatims

on actiwes and passives

339

by everyone, although everyone knows ages, although at least three languages are guages, although everyone knows only s, although everyone knows at least

Notice, however, that ~ra~~i~~~ythe only expressions that could be used appropdately in such. a case ~~~1 ) and (5%) - although carefully intoned utterances of (loa) or (lob) mi rstood in the intended way by some hearers, guld enable a speaker to remove the internal contradiction fr ssions in (111) or (12), the contradiction that results, in Evevc)ne knows only two, languages cannot be understood as saying that there two languages which are common to everyone, but can only be used to convey information that everyone is bilingual, Surprisingly enough, contextual pressure is precisely what had been invoked by Katz and Postal in support of their contention that (2), (2)

veryone in the room knows two languages.

which they admit can be true in case different people know different pairs of languages, also has a reading under which the languages in question must be the same two for everyone. In their argument quoted at the beginning of section 2 above, an argument they have attributed to Chomsky, they had maintained that since a complex expression cannot be true unless its constituents are, and since (2) is a constituent of(l), (1) There are two languages which evzryone in the room which is true only in case the languages referred to are the same for everyone, it folav ) must have a reading under which it is about the same two languages. 2 this conclusion to follow, two points should have been proved that appear to have simply been taken for granted. First, it should have been made deal that the relevant semantic aspect of (I) cannot possibly be attributed to the matrix 2 Exactly the same line of reasoning can be found in Chomsky’s own versionof the argument in question, although in his overall conclusion Ch sky already anticipates the position adopted1 in the Extended Standard Theory when he sts that the order of quantifiers in surface structures might filter out certain “latent” interpretations of sentences like (2) and their passives that are provided by their semantically equivalent deep structures. Unlike Katz afid Postal, Chomsky assumes that the active-passive pairs in question are not synonymous (cf. Chomsky 1965: 224, note 9).

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S. Sehoorl / Observaths on activesar,d passives

expression mere are two Rel languages which presumably underlies (l), and that this semantic aspect must therefore be attributed to whatever expression underlies the relative clause in (1). Second, sufficient semantic evidence should have been provided to support the syntactic claim that it is (2) that must be assumed to occur as the underlying relative clause for (1). As a matter of fact, it is hard to see how either of these points could be prove Notice, first, that when the facts are as represented in fig. 1 above, and when the is no one in the room beyond the individuals listed in fig. 1, (1) will be perfectly true with respect to fig. 1, where it is a fact that there are indeed two languages, Finnish and English, which everyone in the room knows. ut since Bill and Mary earh ‘know four languages and the others each know three t is also a fact of fig. I that everyone in the room knows at least three languages, not just two, and hence (2) is not the kind of thing that one might SLYsincerely about fig. 1. What this shows is that (1) can be true whilst (2) is not, and given the principle that a complex expression cannot be true unless its constituents :are we must conclude that thnt tha ne-xmn *r;rrn;m 1* tnrs.,;rntI f31 VCU&“VI 0annr.t ha m prsnet/t*wsmt \&‘I “V u N#“~‘JUC”~LI~ “4 \a,. Uw#L’IIU, IIUCI~Q WLQL uib i)ai1ib yiiiibipd ibyuub3 that mere are two Rel languages be true whenever (1) is. Now for this to be the case the element Rel cannot be meaningless: a meaningless ReZ would make mere are two Rel languages semantically equivalent to There are two languages, an expression that is not true with respect to the situation portrayed in fig. 1 in which there are five languages. Wh?t we need, therefore, is a semantic interpretation rule which enables us to read thr: phrase [ReZ languages] as an expression designating a subset of a larger set of langages, a subset whose members each satisfy whatever characterization is to be found under Kcl. This being so, the ‘largerexpression 77zere ar2 fwo Rel languages might then be read as saying that the subset des ed by [Rel languages] consists of two members, and the fact that (1) is abou same two languages for everyone in the room would follow directly from the meaning of the matrix sentence that is supposed to underlie (1), and not from the meaning of whatever expression must be assumed to underlie its relative clause. I conclude., then, that the argument with which Katz and Postal believed to have clogd the subject of quantificational counterexamples to their hypothesis by no means warrants their conclusion that an active sentence like Everyone in the room knows two languagesis a full paraphrase of the passive Two languagesare known by nf

[I\

Cn~ttmA

rrr\+;nn

everyone in the room.

I have dwelt upon Katz and Postal’s argument concerning these sentences mainly because it illustrates how their hypothesis at deep structures of the type proposed nt basis for semantic interpretation, under the Standard Theory formed a su t it%hypothetical character almost ri t from the start and had come to be oncerning the semantic relevance of upon, instead, as a hard and fast such deep structures, a rule which said, in effect, that whenever a given deep structure proposal was syntactically justified, it automatically provided an adequate and suffiicient basis for the semantic interpretation of the sentence it was assumed to underlie.

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341

It was the correctness of this rule that had already been taken for grimted when 3tz and Postal called upon the syntactically justifiable analysis of (1) as deriving from something like (13), (13) [there are two Rel languages [everyone in the room knows two languages]

]

in order to sup ort their contention that the same rule had to be ct:rrect with respect to the syntactically justified analysis of actives and passives, whtjreas if this

rule had really been put forward as an empirical hypothesis, this very analysis of (1) would have been sufficient to refute it. It was the correctness of this rule, also, that Chomsky must have held to be beyond all question wh,en he pointed out that for him Everyone in the rf xmz knows at least two languages and At least two languages are kk!own by eveqlone in the not synonymous, but added: “Still, we might maintain that in such both interpretations are latent (us would be indicated by the identity of the deep stf=uctuFesi)i ai; respects relevant $0 semantic

in&rpretQfionj”

(

1945

:

224,

note 9 ; my emphasis). If the correctness of the hypothesis in question had not already been taken for granted, Chomsky would have been hard put to explain how deep structures could be held to be sufficient for semantic interpretation and yet one and the same deep structure for the sentence Everyone in the room knows at least two languages should be assumed to give rise to the two essentially different

interpretations that he claimed to be latent in it. In a sense, though., the correctness of the hypothesis was indeed ‘beyond all question’ at the time it was put forth by Katz and Postal. In order to question the validity of that hypothesis, that is, in order to determine whether or not a particular deep structure proposal foa: a given sentence rea ed a sufficient basis for ar and reliable notion of its semantic interpretation, one shl3uld have acqui what this semantic interpretation should be like, a what requirements should be satisfied by it. But such notion; were not readily available at the time Katz and Postal formulated their hypothesis and made it the foundation of theL attempt to construct an integrated theory of linguistic description incorporating a grammar of the kind proposed in Chomsky (1957) and a semantic component of the type atz and Fodor (1963). Syntax since 1957 had been autenomous synomy that Chomsky had argued for when h.3 maintained that “important insights and generalizations about linguistic structure may be missed if vague semantic clues are followed too closely”, and that ‘“the similarity between activeand other transformational relations passive 5 negation, declarati if the active-passive relation had been investigated would not have come to li exclusively in terms of such notions as syr~onymity” (1957 : 101).

Now whatever may have been the virtues of autonomous syntax, it surely was not the type of enterprise that might have been undertaken in order to remove the many obscurities that surrounded the notion of linguistic meaning, the very obseurities that had forced [Chomsky to make syntax autonomous, and it was thanks .to

342

S. S&ml

/ Ohervations on actives md passives

no autonomous synt;?ctic cl~arification of what semantics was all about that Katz: and Postal could venture to postulate their hypothesis and to claim, &effect, that Chomskyan deep s%-dcxureswere indistinguishable, for purposes of semantic interpretation, from strtxtures w’hichmight have been proposed if semantic notions had not been vague and had been specific enough for an adequate syntactic theory to be based on them. But @ven this lack of sufficiently clear and specific semantic notions, the claim inhcxent in the Katz-Postal hypothesis wcasbound to remain vacuous and literally un+testionable. To be sure, no sophisticated ideas about the semantics of natural language were required for anyone to recognize that sentences like (14a-c below are not fully

(14) (a) Harry saw Bill. (c) Did Harry see Bill? so that even when armed with nothing beyond the prima facie insight into the semantics of declaratives, negatives and interrogatives that somehow such sentences differ in meaning, one could not possibly have failed to notice that the derivations which had been proposed for interrogatives and negatives in Chomsky (1957) did not offer the type of syntactic analysis under which anything like the Katz-Postal hypothesis would have even the ghost of a chance to get accepted as valid. And it was evidence of this sort that made Partee maintain that the rise of that hypothesis was “marked by interesting results which [. . .] provded a prima facie justification” for Katz and Postal’s approach, since “in exe after case it was shown that a more careful syntactic analysis led to derivations in which transformations were meaningpreserving” (1971: 654-S). Surely the minimum J*equirement to be met by any ar at was to support the Katz-Postal hypothesis and at the same time do justice to such correct but trivial insights into the semantics of sentences li (Ma-c) was that it should derive them from non-identical deep structures. was nothing beyond this minimum requirement that had been satistz and Postal had demonstrated that the 1957 analysis of declaratives, s and interrogatives must be rejected on andependent syntactic grounds and derive, instead, from deep transformations; that got triggered rsis suffL.:edto corts is to assume that

tides a suffrcien

ants derive from differand more j,mport~tly, that each such structure in s for the semantic ~~t~rpr~t~~o~of the sentence it is

8. Schooiyl / Observationson activesmtd passives

343

claimed to underlie. Ancl this is a requirement that specific deep structures for interrogatives and negatives can be shown to satisfy only to the extent to which the semmtics of such sentences have been explored beyond the level at which one cannot help recognizing that negatives and interrogatives somehow differ in meaning from the corresponding declaratives. Accordingly, it was not until considerably less trivial insights into the semantics of negation and questioning had become available in the late “&ties that the Katz-Postal hypothesis could really be put to the test and be given up as a result. This happened when Chomsky (1970: 89ff.) found himself forced to conclude that an adequate account of what exactly was being asked and presupposed with sentences like Did Harry see Bill? Did Harry see Bill?

could not be based on deep structure alone in an Aspects-type framework, in which each of these sentences had been assumed to derive from the same deep structure. This also happened when it was demonstrated in Smith (1969) that a sentence of the general form given in (14b) could not only be read as denying that it was Bill who got seen by Harry or as denying that it was Marry who saw Bill, but also as asserting hat it was Bill who did not get seen by arry or as asserting that it was Harry who did not see Bill, observations which fo : us to give up the Katz-Postal hypothesis ~i~$-~z’sthe Aspects based assumption shat the &t in a sentence like (14b) invariably derives from the occurrence of the sentence-marker NEG in a deep structure of the general form [NEG [Harry saw BilE]], because such an analysis does not even satisfy the above-mentioned minimlAm requirement that declaratives re. and negatives should be distinguished at the level of deep s -trivial insights into Given such lack of a sufficiently large set of reliable the semantics of natural language in the early days of transformational generative grammar, the almost immediate rebuttal of the Katz-Postal hypothesis by 2X (196(i), which will be discussed in th? remainder of this article, was in fact bound to fall on deaf ears.

3.

tz

and

iff (1966) had presen ted pairs of actives and corresponding passives with quanambiguities and that must tifiers and pronouns that were shown to ‘“both actives and passives therefore be taken as eou lterevidence t containing quantifiers and pronouns are amb’ us in the samieway and so : 72). In. addition, he prese paraphrases of each other”’ (‘Katz and Postal 1 be maintained with respect argument to show that a claim like this to actives and passives that contained neither pronouns nor quantifiers. Katz and

S. Schoorl / Observations on actives and passives

344

Martin ( 1967) halve rejected Ziff s arguments as inconellusive. In what

will comment on the various points that have been. raised in that discussi examine the evidence that has been produced. It will be shown that semantic interpretation rules cannot ignore the, order of words in surface strings in a wider racge of cases than has shitherto been acknowledged. Part of the evidence by Ziff in support of his contention that actives and passives containing pronouns and quantifiers are not always equally ambiguous consisted of the sentences (15) throu,gh (18) below: ( 15) (a) (b) ( 16) (a) (b) (I 7) (a) (b) (18) (aj (b)

Everyone pleases his wife. His wife is pleased by everyone. No one is liked by his wife. His wife likes no one. Everyone is frightened by his ~OUSC. His house frightens everyone. No married man is liked by his wife. His wife likes no married man.

Bub (I 5a) and (16a) are ambiguous between it being the s;:gje wife for everyone or a different one, an ambiguity that cannot be read into the corresponding sentences (1 Sb) and (16b). The expression by his house ti (I 7a3 can be given a locative reading as well as an agentive one, and under either reading the sentence as a whole is ambiguous between it being the same or a different house for everyone, whereas (1 ?b) has only one of these four readings. Under one of its readings (18a) can be arapilrased as (16a), but no such reading can be assigned to (18b). On the force of ese obwrvations Ziff conclu;led that it would be downright false if not absurd to claim with Katz and Psstal that actives and passives containing quantifiers and prombiguous” and “full paraphrases of each other”, tz and Martin have retorted that Ziff had wrongly assumed the claim in question to have been about surface sentences whereas it had in fact been a claim about the semantic equivalence of structures underlying such sentences. erefore, as long as a surface sentence that is n ways ambiguous can be shown to erive from n different underlying structures, with M> 1, Ziffs llbservations regardthe pairs (1 Q-(1 8) do not necessarily contradict the claim that actives and passives are synonymous. Katz and Martin illustrated their point a discussion of (15a-b). On their analysis the ambiguous surface sentence ISa) can be derive from two different underlyi g structures, (19a) and (19b), y one of which, (19b), is s~rn~ti~a y equiv~ent to (20), the one and only struce underlying the eon-~bi~ous suyfaee sentence (1 Sb): 3 3 In

Katz and Pm

(l&4),

the wsrk that. ZOffhad en criticiishg, there had not been the of referential iklrficesin underlyingstmctures. Introduction of this

nce or absence of

coreferencebetweenitems in underlyingstructuls

briefly, in Chom$ky (1965: 145). Katz md Martin refer ts Postal

S. Schoorl / Observations on actives and passives

345

(19) (a) [everyone l pleases everyone 1’s wife] I[+ ( 15a)) (20)

(b) [everyone 1 pleases his2 wife] (+ (15a’)) [everyone1 pleases his2 wife by Passive] (-+ (15 b))

y , (15 b) is not the passive corresponding to (15a) as deriving from (1Sa). Instead, the passive corresponding to (15a) on this derivation would have to be of the form illustrated in (21 a) below at the level of underlying structure, a deep structure that would be transformed into i21b) by the passive transformation, be further developed into (21~) by the pronominalization tramformation, and ultimately give rise to the surface sentence (22):

(2 1) (a) [everyone 1 pleases everyone i’s wife by Passive]

(b) [everyonel’s wife is pleased by everyonel] (c) [everyoner’s wife is pleased by him11 Everyone’s wife is pleased by him. (22) The latter sentence was itself found ambiguous by Katz and Martin, and they therefore pointed out that (21a) would not be the only possible source of it: the same surface string #:ould be derived from an underlying structure of lthe form (23) pe? structural active counterpart of vhich would be (24), the structure that presur!lably underlies the non-ambiguous surface string (25): (23)

[her pleases everyonez9s wife by Passive] el pleases everyonez9s wife] e pleases everyone’s wife.

In ord(?r 1.0 demonstrate the non adAx nature of t eir proposlals, Katz and Martin poWxd out how derivations along the liies they had suggested could be supported on independent grounds. Thus, the use of i dices to marls sanleness or difference of reference within phrase markers would be required anyhow in order to account for the wellformedness of both (26a) and (26b) as deriving from (27a) *and (27b) respectively:

John pleases himself. [John I pleases John21 [John1 pleases Johni] The condition that normally pronominalization operates from left to right - a condition that blocks a derivation of (15b) from (2 1b) - would be required independently in order to account for the illformedness of something like (28): (28)

Wimselfpleases John.

S. Schwrl

346

/ Observakm

on actives and passives

And the principle that the passive transformation must apply before pronomin& zation - according to which (2 la) does not first get developed into (29a) and then be passivized to get (29b) - would be required snyhow in order to rule out a de vation of‘ the illformed surface string (30a) from the putative deep structure (3Ob): 4

(29) (a) [ever) one 1 pleases his2 tife by Passive] (b) [his1 wife is pleased by everyone l] (30) (a) Himself was pleased by John. (b) [John1 pleased John1 by Passive] artin concluded that it is only at the level of underlying structure that a workable and uniform syntactic definition can be given of active-passive correspcndence, and that with respect to this level of andysiis Ziff s observations actually support the claim that an active and its copresponchg passive are synonymous. ziff’s

c&i&-m_ t,f’ &&

agd p~st,d’s_ &aim s-wtive~ naccivec rnrrtainicrr WY“VI. wu.A’“‘“~ ____II ahnllt __.e “_ w-w*. _ an,d ~w..d*.

quantifiers and prrjnouns on the basis of his observations regarding sentences li:ke (I Q-(1 8) has not deserved, I think, the rather slighting treatment it received from Katz and Martin. Ziff had directed his criticism against the claim that “both actives and passivt s containing quantifiers and pronouns are am!biguous in the same wily and so are full paraphrases of each other” (Katz and Postal 1964: 72), the very claim that its authors had sought to uphold against Chemsky’s observation that the members of active-passive pairs like Eweryme in the KXV~Jknows at least two lavaguggt’s and At /east n910languages are kraowua by eveg’ofze in the room are not syncnymous. In defence of their claim Katz and Post had tr:ied to show that, despite appearances to the contrary, a surface passive of the type in #question was in facl susceptiblc - i:’ only latently or in specific contexts - to Mh of the Werpretaiions could be associat ith the corresponding surface z tive, so the t motivilted deep tural equivalence which they had postulate strings of that type was fully consistent with the hypothesis that SHII pretation rules need only have recourse to underlying syntactic represt: i ‘learly, then, themselves had intended their cl:, 4 Ai .tally, Katz and artin explained the ~~~forrnedi~e~~sof (3Oa) in part by stipulating that pzr.Gzation must get blocked i,n case the NPs that are permuted bjf the passive transformation and ,~%~chart: both pxt of the sitme si vel of underlying structurcz, have identical rCf”e,t:ntial indices. This constraint wou e derivations of either (3Oa) or J&n ~~22 plea PC!by himdf from (305) no matt in what order ~i~ssiv~~~t~~)nshould bt: made $0 apply retatlw to pr~~lorn~.~~atjo~, without also preventing the analysis they had pro d~riCng frc~n (21a); in this case, the referential identity obtains between NPs xl 111~s5urn~~~to belong to different Ss, the occurrence of C?VLTYUI~~ in everyone take:1 to originate in an embedded S of thle form Everyone has a wif2 at the level of underlying StRkC WC.

S. Schoorl / Observe tions on activesatad passives

347

onymy of actives and passives containing quantifiers and pronouns as a claim ut surface sentences, and it cannot have escaped Katz and Martin, like it had not was not the smt of claim that one might have successfully st counterexamples such as had been adduced by Ziff, if only because to subs to Katz and Postal’s assumption of non-lexical ambiguities at structure would have been enough to condemn their fundading the suffici,ency of underlying structures for purposes of ~rn~ti~ interpretation. Instead of openly admitting this, however, Katz and Martin (1967: 478) denour~~ed “‘Ziff’s version” of the thesis about actives and >assivesas lation” of the thesis in Katz d Postal (1964). But since “Ziff’s g, but a version which he had literted from Katz Postal and which he had construed in hors had intended, for Katz and that version is to support s j~ldgeme~t, not to invalidate it. One cannot irrelevant and subsequently draw hose professedly irrelevant objecA certain lack of fairness, however, is not the only imperfection in Katz and to Ziff. As a matter of fact, the elucidations and modifications which tin have provided do not at all remedy the defects in the transformasis of pronouns that had come to light through Ziff s objections. atz and Martin’s proposals as cited earlier it is (22) rather than His wife plemed by ew one which must be held to form the passive corresponding to e coreferential ading of Ziffs example (1 Sa), and if active-passive correspondence is defined in terms of underlying syntactic representations - like Katz Martin have claimed it should be - the alleged correspondence between (15a) (22) oould indeed be id to have been made explicit in the sources which they have postulated for the (15a) Everyone pleases [everyone1 pleases the wife2 everyone1 has a wife?]] one’s wife is pleased by him. (22) porn: [everyone 1 pleases the wife everyone 1 has a wife* ] by Passive reference markers ~ture constituent

rvtin”s inadequate derivation of (22)

348

S. Schoorl / Observationsolt activestendpassives

it would be iI>fno avail to reformulate the conditions on the passive transformation so as to prevc?nt its application not only to structures of the form [s NPI Verb NP, ] (see fn. 4 above) but also to cases in which coreference holds across sentence boundaries at the level of underlying structure. For one thing, those conditions are too strong already: even without any reformulation they prevent the derivation of things like (31a--b) below, which yet do not particularly strike one as the kind of sentences that anyone should have any fault to find with: ’ (3 1) (a) Spiro was only admired by himself. (!I) Henry was praised mainly by himself. In addition, the reformulation suggested would result in the unjustified exclusion of coreferential readings for sentences like (32a-d): (32) (a)hhts ‘Swife had to be driven to the clinic by hina. (b) I&~? S children are simply adored by hi. (c) Sanz ‘s children were brought up by their grandparents. (d) Sain J child ren were brought up by his parents. Finally, the reformulatit~n in question, whi& would block the derivation of a pas. sive like (33a) from a source like (33b), would not prevent the derivation of (34a:) from the corresponding active sourc;e (34b): (33) (a) (b) (34) (a) Cb)

Everyone is pleased by her husband. [the husband* [everyone* has a husbandr] pleases everyone2 by Passive] Everyone’s husband pleases her. [the hushand [everyone2 has a husband1 pleases everyone2]

cases like these, ho%Yever,it is the active rather than the passive which fails to t of the coreferential reading that must be connected with such sources, the of rehding that paraphrases as Every husband pleases hj.s (own) wife’. It follows that a general s&.itii:n for the oblems associated with Katz and Martin’s pro-, derive a sentence like Everyorzc S wife pleased by h,irrafrom a deep strucevevone, pleases the wife2 cveryorael has a wife21 ky Passive] k mt to be found in a reformulation of the conditions governing the applications thz passive tran~fo~ation, since exactly the same problems arise with the deriv~~~o~of an active sentence li tative source (34b). In either case robbery appears to resul from the fact + for the sentences in question to ref~ren Ri rstood to refer I should be u e~~re~;i aves exactly an anaphoric

S. Schoorl / Observattims on activesand passives

349

island in the sence of Postal (1969): k!%eryone’swife is pleased by him and E’veryone’s husband pkzses her do not admilt of the reading ‘Every husband pleases his own wife’ any more than El!ery husbwd pleases her would or than An orphan deeply misses them would admit of the reading ‘An orphan deeply misses his parents’. Moreover, it is not only with respect to referential items that do not seem to originate in the same simple S at the level of underlying structure that objeciions must be raised against Katz and Martin’s treatment of coreferential pronouns $3~ deriving from copies of their antecedents that bear the same index. According to Katz and Martin surface sentences like (35a) and (3Aa) below must be assumed to derive from deep structures of the form (35b) and (36b) respectively:

(35)(a) Everyone pleased himself. (b) [everyone 1 Past please everyone 1] (36)(a) Everyone pleased everyone. [everyone! Past please everyone42] Now suppose we haIre a situation in which everyone can be used to refer collectively to the individuals John, Bill, Fred and Dick. In such a situation the respective conceptualizations corresponding to (35a) and (36a) would be as symbolized in figs. 2 and 3, where ‘X-- Y’ stands for ‘X pleased Y’. Notice that the difference between the states of affairs to be associated with these conceptualizations is not a question of sameness or difference of the groups of individuals involved, although this is what is suggested by the reference markers in (35b) and (36b). In either state of affairs there is only one such group, and (35a) can be used to assert that for every member of that group it was the case that he pleased himself whereas (36a) can be used to assert, instead, that for every member of that group it was true that he pleased every member of that group. In order to capture these facts about the semantics a)[( 5a) and (36a) a language processing system should execute the semantic routine to be associated with everyone only once during the interpretation lof (35a). A correct interpretation of (36a), however, would require a second execution of that routine, one in which the results to be obtained from the computation of the reference of everyone must be identi-

BTLL

BILL

BILL

BILL

JOHN

JOWN

JOHN

JONN

FRED

- FRED

FRED

FRED

DICK

DICK

DICK

DICK vp

qVE~ervon& pleased himselfVt c

gqEveryone pleased everyone"

Fig. 2.

Fig. 3.

cal to those obtained as a result: of its fb: execution. This being so, it follows that within 2 framework of linguistic description in wlIti& underlying structures are to provide a suBCent basis for semantic ~ter~re~~,~~on~ no adequate account of the semarlrtics of (35a) and (36a) can be given when sentences like these must be assumed to derive from underlying structures of the form (3Sb) and (316b). in against an analysis of sentences ar objections must be b:t lich these derive from underlying and J&n saw hinase~~’ SW ~0~~ J respectively, the type of structures like fJohnl SW Juhnz] and [JO to provide independent support for ~~ysis which Katz and &Martinhad Aim use of referential indices in syntactic deeI) structures. In keeping with th.at sis a sentence like (37) below should always be understood as a statement about different ~di~du~s that bear the same mane; as a possible pamphrase, that is, of things like (3%-d):

(3-v

Nixon supported Nixon.

(38) (a) Nixon’s father supported his son. (b) Richard Nixon supported Donald Nixc~ (c) One Nixon supported the other. (d) Nixon supported his namesake. though that whenever the occurrence of Nixon as the subject NP in a 6 of (37) suffices to unequivocal\ly refer a hearer of that sentence chard Nixon, its subsequent ccurrence as the object NP can only be understood as a reference to the same person ag ain; if not, its first occurrence coul have been sufficient to une ocally refc r that hearer to that person in the first place. For the same reason, two OCCUPY :ni:es of h%xsn in an utterance of (39) ust be understood to refer to the same inditidual in case an uttera.nce of that senI- has to go by in his attempt to find out what his is everything the er tries to convey abide

esis about the sufficiency of underlying synantic interpretation does not hold a.gainst strulztures in which

rstood eo iT!fer to a atic occurrence of a linin which no other mem of cm ative inwraction is being e. I(n SW.%a situ&o only way for the hearer of the ind the sped CET wishes to ta about is to interpret the cm that are being used in the ~tteram:. s

S. Schwrl

/ Observations on acltives and passives

35 .I\

Things would not have been any better if Katz and Martin had stuck to earlier proposals regarding the reflexive transformation accordtingto which the rule applied optionally to identical NPs in underlying simple sentences. For this type of proposal to be consistent with the Katz-Postal hypothesis sentences like (37) and (39) would have to be synonymous with their rcflexivized counterparts (40) and (41) below, which they are not; even though, as we have seen, the successive occurrences of Nixon in simple utterances of (37) and (39) must be itssumed to be referentially identical : (40) Nixon supported himself. (41) Only Nixon supported himself. To be sure, it is hard to see how Nixon could ever support himself and yet refrain from supporting Nixon. herefore, any differentiation between sentences like (37) and (40) at a level of representation that is to be subjected to semantic intcrpretation would seem to be superfluous: a distinction without a difference. Wouid seem to be, because sentence pairs like (42) or (43) show that such a distinction would not always be without a difference: (42) (a) Nixon (lb) Nixon (43) [:a) Nixon (Lb)Nixon

supported supported supported supported

Nixon, and ~$0did Ford. himself, and so did Ford. Nixon, which Ford did not. himself, which Ford did not.

What these sentences tend to show is that the equisignificance of things like (37) and (40) results from the neutralization., by coincidence, of a difference that does parry the distinction between ‘supp ixon’ and ‘supporting oneself’: it is with Nixon, and only with Nixon, tha ot tell the support he gave to Nixon from the support he gave to himself. The proper way to handle the facts about (42) and (43) is to have distinct representations for their constituents (37) and (401~1 to serve as the btsis fo: semantic interpretation, and have this distinction obliterated during instead of prior to t to have distinc: lingttistic represenwpports M’s

ction obliterated as

ir semantic interpree the facts about

the distinction cut a difference : (39) Only Nixon supported Nixon,, (41) Only Nixon supported himsel:f.

352

S. Schuud /

Obsmatiuns on mtives md pasives NIXON

NIXON

KISSINGER

KISSINGER MITZ=HELL

RITCHELL

AGf3EW

AGM34

"021~1Nixon supported Nix~t:~~ (TRUE) "Only Nixon supported himselt" (FALsZ:) Fig. 4.

NIXON

NIXON

KISSINGER

KISSINGER

MITCHELL

MITCHZLL

AGNEW "Only Nixon supported Nixon"

(FALSE)

"Only Nixon supported himself" (TRUE) Fig. 5.

For (39) to be true the only support for Nixon must have come fi-om Nixon him-

self, whereas for (41) to be true he must have been t.he only person who supported himself. Figs. 4 and 5 show that one can be the case whilst the other is not. Clearly, then, (39) and (41 j have different truth conditions and so are not synonymous. It follows that no linguistic description can be adequate in which the distinctions between such surface sentences get obliterated prior to the operation of scmantic interpretation rules. f have argued above that the stil=cessiveoccurrences of Nixon lirasimple utterances of sentences like Nixon supported Nixon or Only Nixon su,gported Nixon nust be referentially identical. This should not have been taken to imply, though, that no utterance of these sentences could ever be understood by an audience as ertaininig to different individuals. ‘Thu a speaker of Nixon supported NLwn might oint consecutively to photogra~~s of ichard and of Donald Nixon, ‘whilstuttering e to get the same information across to his conveyed with a simple utterance of Richatrd at’s wrong, after all, with Katz and Martin’s

to derive a surface string like N&WZsupported Nixon, under one of its rea-dings,from a syntactic deep structure in which the two occurrences of Nixon ve been marked as referentially different?

S. Schoorl/ Observations on actives and passives

353

Notice, first, that in a case like this it is a difference in the circumstances attending UpOn fie swcessive occurrences of NLWZ in such an utterance that must be held responsible for the fact that these occurrences should come to be understood

as pertainiag to different &dividuals. And surely this is not the sort of &cumstantial evidence that one should expect any supporter of autonomous syntax to rely upon in defence of his proposal to derive the ilentence in question from a syntactic deep structure of the form [Nixon1 supported Ahun J. [f it were, one might just as well propose to make [A?EG] om of the syntactic representations underlying Yes on the force of the observation That the disagreement to be associated with [NEG] cm be successMy conveyed by a c;peaker who shakes his head whilst uttering Yes. ’ Notice, also, that the case for active-passive synonymy would hardly be strengthenec if the postulation of syntactic deep structures were to be based, in part, on such essentially non-linguistic evidence. To see this, think of a speaker who performs a particular sequence of actions so as to enable his audience to under,--2,, utterance as ..-A,....: stand the successive occurrences 0fP~X~onin an aiccompa~iyihg UIIG~,~vocally referring to Richard and Donald Nixon, respectively. Now if the speaker accompanies this sequence of actions with an utterance of Nixon supported Nixon, his audience will understand him to have imparted that Richard Nixon supported Donald Nixon, whereas for the speaker to accomoany the: same sequence of actions with an utterance of Nixon wus supported by Nixon would ble to unequivocally impart to his hearer that Richard Nixon was supported by Donald Nixon. &d since these speech acts differ only in the sentences that are being used in them - the accompanying sequence of actions having been assumed to be the same in both cases - the highly different interpretations that they turn out to give rise to can only be accounted for on the basis of the assumption that such sentences have em, conditions in which a different appropriateness conditions associated hich referring expressions crucial importance should be attached to the o occur in surface sentences. Essentially the same argument has been presented by Ziff (1966) with respect to an imaginary situation in which one man struck another. Only a single blow was struck, but reports as to who actual’ly struck that blow are conflicting. Thus, one witness reports (44a), another (44b): (44) (a) George struck Josef. (b) George was struck by Josef.

’ This is not to say, though, that linguists might ignore such observations altogether. They cannot be invoked in support of syntactic proposals by those who have proclaimed the autonomy af syntax, but they surely can be used as a basis for the rejection of such an autonomy by those linguists who have made it their task to try and elucidate the role of linguistic expressions in the over-all communicative interaction of human beings.

S. Schmrl / O.bserva(tionson actives and passives

354

A third witness points at George while saying (45a), a fourth sa;vs (45b) while pointing at Josef: (45) (a) He struck

(b) He struck the blow. The conflict between the reports that were given by the fir!;t two witnesses can readily be accounted for in terms of their having used non-synonymous sentences, whereas the conflicting statements that were made by those who uttered the sentences (45a) and f45b) is readily explicable in terms of a diifference in the nonverbal behaviour with which they accompanied their utterances,. But now consider two other witnesses, one pointing first at George and then at Josef while saying (46a), the other also pointing first at Ceor;ge and then at Josef, but saying (46b): (46) (a) That man struck that man. (b) That man was struck by that man. Once more we have two conflicting reports, but in this case we cannot appeal to a difference in the non-verbal behaviour with which those wbtnesses accompanied their utterances: there is no difference. Hence, if we want to explain the conflict, we are forced to think of (46a) and (46b) as being non-synonyrnous. Katz and Martin have replied that Ziff’s conclusion reveals the failure to distinguish type from token. A linguistic theory is concerned with types of expressions and their interrelations, not with token?, but it is tokens and nat types that Ziff had been arguing about, as is clear from the situational clues he provided. For Katz and Martin a semantic theory in linguistics “cannot possibly be required to information about someone’s interpretation of a sentence token due to the cal) situation” (1967: 486, fn. 22). And for good reasons, it seems, if ody because tokens of different but synonymous sentence types, just like tokens of one and th.e same sentence type, d to make infinitely many differl:nt statements. This being so, Ziff’s obse at certain sentence tokens may give rise lto conflicting ~ter~retations 3stulation of semantic differencets ~tween the corres refuses to conclude from mployed to make different types, then why,, Katz and they must be tokens o to conclude from the si se do constitute token: artin does seem to exhibitory occurrences r a (semantic) theory in

S. Schmd / Ubserwisns

on (actives and passives

355

linguistics. Upon closer inspection., however, Ziff’s argument can be seen ta have been considerably less crooked and inconsistent than Katz and Martin have made it out to be in their rebutt . For one thing, any attempt l:o tu;m (45a) and (4%) into tokens of ~f~erent I tie types Gould have to be cut short with O&ham’s razor, and hence Katz and in could :motvery well have expected Ziff to argue about e synonynly or non~y~onym~~ of ying types that are not there. contrast, attempts to make (465a tokens of different linguistic types must go unpampered - a Procrustean razor not being a tool of the linguistic he question can and must be posed whether the different types b) are tokens of really are synonymous. Besides, Ziff’s answer s not crucially depend on the token chuacter of his examples: surely it is not as he had sought to prove that the different types underw cannot be synonymous and h;:d based his conclusion an utterance of (47a) on March 3,197s reported something 7b) on August 7,19 l

truck the secretary of state. b) The secretary of state was struck by the president. Ziff’s observations regarding the conflict inherent in (46a-b) hold true of any pair of tokens of these sentences, no matter when they would be uttered, or by whom, and can be gener~~zed as follows: for any speaker S and any audience A addressed by S, and for any two individual entities X and Y that S wishes to talk about to A, any non-ve behaviour on the part: of S which would make A unequivocally understand accompanying utterance by S of Xhat man struck that man as conveying that X struck would likewise make A unequivocally understand an accompanying utteranc y ,.$of T%at man was stmck by that man as conveying, instead, that 2’ struck X, Since, t ivalence which Ziff had all other tokens of these noticed for his examples (46a) and seen to hold of a host of sentences, and since corresponding generalizations c was struck by John or similar sentence gairs such as J~h!rr struck John v hrd;rorasupporlred Mxorz v. Nixon was supported by Nixon, WE:have no choice but to extend this lack of equivalence to the types that such sentences are tokens of, elude that the appropriateness conditions folr actives are not in general nt to hose for the corre t the distin&isn between exhibitory and ition, it is important to realize t really be equated WBJI fie

things like (48) through (50) one and the same undarlyin many purposes, indeed for p

e level of linguistic abstraction, ked upon. as three different tokens of

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of linguistic expressions are being used by students of autonomous syntax, the differences between such expression-tokens can be safely ignored: (48) John hit Bill.

(49) Fred struck Harry. (50) Bill tit John. many purposes, however, indeed for practically all purposes for which pragmatic occurrences of linguistic expressions are being used by speakers and their hearers, to ignore the differences between the above expression-tokens would be rather i&advised, although one should certainly wish to abstract away from specific instances of those expressions such as might be observed in the actual use of language by this or that particular speaker and his audience. At another and equally legiguistic abstraction, then, things like (48) through (SO)above conrent utterance-types as they might be called, types whose tokens can be found in the actual speech and writing of individual language users. Given these distinctions I conclude that Ziffs observations regarding the nonsynonymy of Thut mm struck that man and 171at man wus struck by that mm tokens of which can be used to make the same statement about two dii’ferent individuals if and only if such tokens are accompanied by different stretches of non-verbal behaviour - certainly hold for utterance-types of that form. It remains to be seen whether they also hold for the corresponding expression-types. I believe they do not, t for independent reasons, reasons which would make it ~~~bl~ for I&z and artin to maintain that the expression-types underlying ese sentences me synonymous in the generally accepted sense of that term. To see this, notice that the relevant notion of synonymity - here roughly, for any x and y, if ‘x struck y ’ then )I was struck by x’, and conversely - cannot be defined for ~~xpre~on-types of the sort Katz and Martin had been arguing about. The referential indices that played such a crucial role in their argument about reflexivization ar:d prono.~inalization can only be used to mark the presence or absence of referential identity between PII%occurring vvithin one and the same phrase marl;er. 8 It follows that (52a) below is neither better nor worse as a r;ndidate for 22 passive terpart 0.C(5 1) th i either (52b) or (52~): Fsr equrPlly

(b) [that man2

(~9~8~: 82-4; 1948b: 76-7) and ~omsky (1970: 76, footnote 11) for objection’s tid indiies tot also H1;vk sameness or difference of reference across phrase that would be tantamoiwt to having in&ended referents incorporated into

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Therefore, the only kind of ‘synonymy’ that can be captured with deep structures 3 la Katz and Martin is the following: if ‘X struck .I’‘, then ‘z was struck by Y‘, and conversely. In other words, the synonymy that obtains between expressions like George stmck Josef and Josef wasstm& by George is nothing stronger than the semantic relation which obtams between, say, George struck Josef and EZZ IWS struck by Harry. But then, to f”lnd oneself trapped into such an empty notion of synonymy between actives and corresponding passives serves him right, I think, who tries to describe the semantic properties of linguistic expressions on the basis of a study of their exhibitory occurrences, the type of occurrence under ;Aich declarative sentences convey no statements, interrogative sentences ask no questions of their maders or listeners,. and referring expressions are not being used to refer anyone to Lmything at all.

4. Conclusion

The foregoing discussion does not admit of the conclusion that the KatzPostal hypothesis - which has been shown in retrospect to have been a rather wild speculation at the time it was put forward, with no solid evidence to support it must be rejected altogether: it has been shown, irldeed, that underlying structures such as had been proposed under the Standard Theory do not provide 3 sufficient basis for semantic interpretation, but there is always the possibility of transformational generative grammarians coming up with propos3ls for deep structures that do support the hypothesis in question. Discussing the need for linguistic theory to “give a substantial characterization to the universal vocabulary from which grammatical descriptions are constructed”, Chomsky has admitted that Vhere is no reason to ut, a priori, the trc.ditional ately refer to sem3ntic conview that such substantive characterizations must I cepts of one sort or another” (1965: 116-7). Also, in 3 discussion of the questions that must be accounted for with descriptively adequate grammars and with 3 general linguistic theory that a,ims for explanatory adequacy, he has remarked that ‘Hague and !.msupported assertions about the “semafltic basis for syntax” make no contribution to the understanding of these questions” (1965: 78). Commenting upon these remarks, Strawson once nicely observed that “vague and ursupported assertions, of course, do not rnake much of a contribution to the understanding of anything. But if a general direction of inquiry seems promising, if indeed one can see no altemativf: to it, one sh.ould surely seek in that direction for assertions which are not vague and which one can support” (1969: 139). No such irony would be deserved, I believe, in the case of Katz ant1 Postal’s speculations about an autonomous syntactic basis for semantics. In retrospect, their assertions in this matter surely appear to have been vague and unsupported, but that &rould not be surprising, for assertions about semantic matters that were made when K3tz and Fodor (1963) had only just launched their attempts, revolutionary

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at the time, to breathe new life into the systematic study of lingui&ic meaning. Under these circumstances the Katz=Postal hypothesis did indeed serve to establish a new direction of inquiry in linguistics: what made its proponents so anxious to pr0ve their claim that the syntactic; analysis proposed by Chomsky did provide a sufficient basis for semantic interpretation was their recognition, if only tacitly, of a new and important methodological principle, the principle that for any syntactic analysis the ultimate justification was to be found in the support it would pr0vide for semantic interpretation. Students of autonomous syntax might never have sought to syst.ematically justify their syntactic proposals in accordance with that principle nor might they ever have c0me to assign an increasingly important role to semantic considerations in the heuristics of syntax if it had not been for the success that the Katz-Postal hyp~~~sjs had claimed was lying ahead. And without such new directions of inquiry in syntactic resach, semantics today might still have been the obscure domain where linguists feared to tread. In this perspective, Katz and Postal’s vague and unsupported assertions about autonomous syntax as a sufficient ‘basis for semantic interpretation may therefore be said to have indeed made an important contribution to a better understanding of what syntax and semantics are ali about. ow of course the reliability of semantic considerations as the ultimate standard for the justification of a particular syntactic proposal and their workab:iity as a heuristic tool i11a syntactic analysis that is to be justified by that standard1entirely depends on their precision and accuracy. And my main purpose in the foregoing ~s~ussion has been to show that the necessary precision in semantics can only be acquired 0nce we have settled for a semantic theory that concentrates on pragmatic occurrences of linguistic expressions and on the appropriateness conditions that govern such occurrences. tic heory of a natural language which adequately portrays the linguistic tence of users of that language should take the form of a set of rou~~es which take pragmatic occurrences of linguistic expressions for their input and translate these into the appropriate conceptualizations. Such a theory should it analyzes its input sequences in such a way th.at simieen such sequences can be related in a systematic :.imilari ties and di ffere s between the corresponding conceptualizatz and Postal had claimed to be satisfied if s i la ~homsky were to constitute the input to semanesent discussion has shown conclusively that in a Iike English which is to operate in rences between actives and passives s that occur in them should not get oblie routines that actually translate such ssntences Gon~p~~~tions, and (ii) those routines should operate of their antecedents. Or, for the less praigmativiz&ion and prono~a~ation must be removed from the list of

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and passives

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eferences Chomsky, A. Noam. 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton. Chomsky, A. Noam. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, A. Noam. 1970. ‘Deep structure, surface structure and semantic interpretation’. In: A.N. Chomsky (1972), Studies on semantics in generative grammar. The Hague: Mouton, pp. 62-119. Dik, Simon C. 1968a. Coordination: its implications for the theory of general linguistics. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Dik, Simon C. 1968b. Referential identity. Lingua 21: 70-97. Katz, Jerrold J. and J.A. Fodor. 1963. The structure of a semantic theory. Language 39: 170210. Katz, Jerrold J. and E. Martin, Jr. 1967. The synonymy of actives and passives. The Philosophical Review 76: 476-91. Katz, Jerrold J. and P.M. Postal. 1964. An integrated theory of linguistic descriptions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Partee, Barbara Hall. 1971. ‘Linguistic metatheory’. In: W.O. Dingwall, ed. A survey of linguistic science. University of M~yidi, pp. 65 i-79. Postal, Paul M. 1966. A note on “understood transitively”. International Journal of American Linguistics 32: 90-8. Postal, Paul M. 1969. ‘Anaphoric islands’. Papers from the fifth regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. University of Chicago, pp. 205-39. Schoorl, Sjef. (In preparation.) Meaning and refererce in natural language: their implications for a theory of :semantic interpretation. Smith, Steven B. 1969. The semantics of negation. Bloomington: indiana University Linguistics Club. Str::~wson, P.F. 1959. ‘Grammar and philosophy’. In: P.F. Strawson (1971), Logico-linguistic paper!;. London: Methuen, pp. 130-48. Ziff, Paul. 1966. “he nonsynonymy of active and passive sentences. The Philosophical Review 75: 226-32. uistics, English, and PsycholinguisSjef Schoorl was born in 1943 and studied Genera s B.A. and M.A. equivalents. From tics at the University of Amsterdam, where he receiv 1969 to 1972 he taught English at a Higher Technical School. He was a Research Fellow of the Netherlands Organization for the Advancement of Pure Research (ZWO) (from 1972 to 1975) and of the Netherlands Psychonomics Foundation (from 1976 to 1977). At present, he is attached to the Linguistics Department, University of Leyden. Some of his research papers have been pub&hed by the Institute for Cognitive Research, University of Amsterdam (ICO), including: 1975. Kognities en taal. Report Nr. ICO.159.JS. 1976a. Notities bjij Fillmores case grammar. Report Nr. ICO.168.JS. 1976b. Procesgerilchte formele syntaksis van eenvoudige nederlandse zinnen. P.eport Nr. ICO.17O.JS. 1976c. De mens :in de taalgebruiker: een memorandum voor (taal)psychologen. Repcit Nr. ICO.189.JS. 1977. Noun phrases as quantifiers. Report Nr. ICO.208.JS. In his dissertahion (Schoorl, in preparation) he expounds and defends a pragmatic view of meaning and reference in natural language.