Grammar and meaning. Papers on syntactic and semantic topics

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James D. McCawley, Grammar and Meaning. Papers on Syntactic and Semantic Topics. (Taishukan Studies in Modern Linguistics. Susumu Kuno and Kinsuke Hasegawa, editors). Taishukan Publishing Company, Tokyo, 1973. Reviewed by &ten Dahl, Department of Linguistics, Univ. of Gateborg, Lundgrensgatan 7, S 4 12 56 G-jteborg, Sweden. The volume under review contains 22 papers, according to the author’s preface *‘essentially my complete works on syntax and semantics up to December 197 I”. Most of the papers have been published earlier, but some have only circulated in mimeographed versions. “The texts that appear here are lightly edited and heavily rn:il;e it possible to see the changes in the author’s annotated”. -1 he annotations opmi3ns between the Limes when the resepctjve papers were written and ! 972. T! us, for those who were already famihar with Mc
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natural to think of semantic analysis as being in principle analogous to phonetic analysis, which means that the goal is to provide ‘semantic representation’ for sentences. This view of semantic analysis is prevalent both in Katzian semantics and in generative semantics (at least in its earlier versions), and it determines to a large extent both the choice of problems and solutions for problems within th:se theories.The main question here is not ‘What is the meaning of S?’ but ‘What tree structure rcprcsents the maning of S?‘. This approach to semantics has already been criticized by many linguists and philosophers, and the adherents of generative semantics (and also, although perhaps to a lesser extent, the adherents of Katzian semantics) have modified their views in significant ways. 1 shall repeat some of the main points of this criticism here, not because I like flogging dead horses, but because an understanding of these problems is necessary for an assessment of McC’s book. By itself, a semantic representation cannot be said to ‘represent’ a meaning if it is not complemented with principles for interpreting it. These principles are not made explicit in generative semantics. Furthermore. it is not made clear by this theory wir;lt kind of entities ‘meanings’ are supposed to he, except that they reside in people’s minds rather than in the outside worl d. As has repeated!y been pointed out by adherents of model-theoretical semantics, it is not sufficient to relate linguistic expressions with conceptual entities if we do not also relate these to things in the outside world. From the point of view of speech act theory, we may add that conceptual entities must also in some way be related to what people do when they use language. It i; perhaps too much to say that the problems concerning the relations between a theory of sense on the one hand. and a theory of reference and a theory of pragmatics on the other hand are not treated at all in the volume under review, but when it is done it is not done in any systematic way and only when it has direct bearing on the choice between different possible tree-structures. A point which is related to what we have said here is that McC often discusses the role logic has to play in linguistic in an inadequate way. One repeatedly finds statements like the following in the book: “it should be evident by now that 1 am proposing a system of semantic representation that is along the lines of the notational systems used in symbolic logic” (244). The use of the term ‘notational system is symptomatic. McC seems to regard what he calls symbolic logic as some sort of semantic IPA, where the important problem is how the symbols are chosen and combined with each other, forgetting that we have not ‘interpreted’ a sentence by as-. sociating it with a logical formula if we do not provide interpretation rules for the logical formula. One can also criticize his unqualified use of the term ‘symbolic logic’ without any indication of what kind of symbolic logic he has in mind (propositional calculus, first order predicate calculus, some version of modal logic or whatever). As far as can be judged from his enumeration of the ‘units’ which have ‘figured in symbolic logic’, it appears that he is thinking of some kind of first order predicate calculus augmented with some devices taken from set theory and at least one feature of second order logic (viz. predicates that take propositions as their arg.!ment??. McC’s treatment of ‘referential indices’ belongs to the more unclear parts of his theory. The unclarity of this notion is bound up with the general problem of the status of semantic representations. McC claims ( 140) that “each noun phrase occur-

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rence in a syntactic representation must have attached to it an ‘index’, which corresponds to ;he ‘purported reference’ of that noun phrase occurrence”. On p. 7 1, he says that “one could perfectly well say that the index does not represent the purported referent but indeed is the jrurported referent’*. Such a formulation might lead one to believe that indices are entities in the world, but it is clear from other statements that McC is rather thinking of something like concepts: “indices will correspond to items in the speaker’s mental picture of the universe rather than to real things in the universe”. But then McC adds to the confusion by talking of indices as ‘terms’: “when one learns a proper name, the semantic information he has learned is an index, namely the term corresponding to the individual who he has learned possesses that name” (ibid.). This wocld suggest that indices are parts of some kind of mental language that we usein thinking, but this is contradicted by the statement that “indices are nonlinguistic units which happen to play a role in linguistic representation”. According to McC, a surface noun phrase corresponds to two things in semanric representation, namely an index and something F fhich he sometimes refers to as a ‘NPdescription’ -which is supposed ‘to provide the J:raterial used in identifying the indices’. The relations between the two are not quite clear. Thus, one may wonder what happens if one chooses a ‘NP-description’ which does nut adequately describe or identify the purported referent. Suppose, for instance, that x1 34 happens to be John, but that we choose the proper name Bill to identify the referent of XI 34. Would such a sentence be a statement about John or about Bill? Would we be deceiving our listeners if we talked in this way? One might claim that such a sentence is semantically deviant, but this would be a kind of invisible deviance. Actually, it can be argued that McC’s semantic representations contain a built-in redundancy insofar as they refer to the same individual in two different ways, i.e. by proper names and descriptions, on the one hand, and by indices, which are actually just a kind of deep structure names, on the other. A further unclarity about referential indices concerns the role that the speaker’s knowledge about their referents play in grammar. According to McC, the choice of gender and number in pronouns “depends on one’s knowledge of the intended referent of the noun phrase” (72). This knowledge is said to be “presupposed? (73) but it is nowhere stated where this presupposed information is going to be represented, if it ic presented at all. Conjunction Reduction, i.e. the transformation that is assumed to derive sentences such as ( 1) from underlying structures like (2), is discussed in several places in the book. (1) John is intelligent and John is handsome (2) John is intelligent and handsome At one time (as reflected for instance in ‘The Annotated Respective’ (124- 125), McC did not believe that such a transformation existed. Later however, he came to the conclusion tha.t there are sentences for which an analysis with Conjunction Reduction is necessary. Thus he says on p. 303: “There must be a rule of conjunction

reduction since there are sentences such as

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(3 1) John has been named vice-president

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and seems pleased with himslef

in which the conjuncts do not correspond to coherent pieces of semantic structure and arise only through the action of transformation”. Prima facie, it may not be clear why the conjuncts in McC’s (3 1) should not correspond to “coherent pieces of semantic structure”, since, on the face of it, each conjunct says a perfectly coherent thing about John, namely, firstly, that he has been named vice-president, and secondly, that he seems pleased with himself. McC’s argument is apparently based on the standard analysis of a sentence like (3 1) in transformational grammar, viz. the one where this sentence is assumed to have an underlymg structure like (3). (3) *Someone has named John vice-president seems

and that John is pleased with John

But in other places, McC argues for a semantic representation where “the content of the NP’s originates outside of the ciacses in which they appear” (255), and if such a theory is accepted, the noun phrase John in (31) can be allowed to appear outside of the conjoined VPs, which would then in fact correspond to “coherent pieces of semantic structure”. The same holds for an analysis based on Lambda calculus (e.g. Cresswell 1973), in which (31) would be treated in a way which can be represented as follows: (4) John is such that he has been named vice-president and such that he seems pleased with himself. Similar objections can be made to McC’s argument (3 17) for the so-called respecrive&-transformation which would derive e.g. (5) i ram underlying conjoined sentences: (5) John and Harry respectively have been arrested for smuggling pot and happen to be in jail for indecent exposure In the paper ‘Tense and Time Reference’, McC discusses cases where ‘several consecutive sentences or clauses . . . all contair, past tenses .., which refer not to simultaneous events but to consecutive events, each past tense referring to a time shortly after that which the preceding past tense referred to” as in (6) The Lone Ranger broke the window with the barrel. of his gun, took aim, and pulled the trigger According to McC, each clause in such a construction contains an implicit reference to the time referred to in the preceding clause (“shortly after tr”). There would therefore be an-antecedent-pronoun relation between the implicit time adverbs in consecutive clauses and, since Langacker’s precede-command constraint excludes

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backward pronominalization in coordinate constructions, this would, says McC, explain why we cannot reorder the constituents in (6). However, it is hard to see why we could not have implicit time adverbs with the meaning ‘shortly before ti’, which would allow other orderings of the clauses. Furthermore, the explanation does not cover the cases where we have consecutive sentences with full stops between them, e.g. (7) John hit Bill. Bill hit back. since we have no command relatio;l here. Rather, the explanation of (6) and (7) must involve general principles for the construction of narrative texts, as suggested e.g. in Dahl ( 1975). Generative semanticists claim that their theory makes it possible to predi,: what is a ‘possible lexical item’ in a human language. Thus, McC says on p. 346 that “the theory predicts that those combinations of semantic elements which cannot be derived by applying the transformations of the language to wel!-formed semantic structures not only do not correspond to existing lexical items but indeed are systematically excluded from the lexicon”. For example, we can explain “why there is no iexicai item meaning”kiss a girl who is allergic to’, i.e. why there is no word *.f7imp which appears in sentences like . .. *Bert j-limped coconuts, that would be paraphraseable as ‘Bert kissed a girl who ,is allergic to coconuts ‘.” This “fcl!ows from the fact that any application of the transformation needed to combine ‘a girl who is allergic to’ with ‘kiss’ would cause the derivation to violate the complex NP constraint”, which was formulated by Ross and which blocks all cases where some rule moves an element out of a ‘complex NP’. However, two pages earlier, McC gives the following underlying structure for the sentence ‘Sally persuaded Ted to bomb the Treasury Building’: (8) Do(Sally, x(CAUSE(x, BECOME(INTEND(Ted, Building))))))

BOMB(Ted, the Treasury

where as McC says on p. 355, “the CAUSE-clause . .. is a relative clause contained within the object of DO”. This structure might plausibly be paraphrased as (9) Sally did something which caused it to become the case that Ted intended to bomb the Treasury Building As far as I can see, there is no essential difference between this case and the case which McC considered a violation of the Complex NP constraint. The only possible difference is that, in the latter, there is a head noun girl in the relative clause, but this is of no significance, since nouns are underlying predicates in McC’s theory and girl must thus come from a relative clause. Either this is an actual contracdiction in the theory or 1 have overlooked some possible explanation, but in the latter case, one should at least have wanted thus explanation clearly stated, in view of the fact

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that the two apparently contradictory the text. On p 348, MC%’gives the fo!lowing

claims are not more than two pages apart in semantic

representation

( IO) I closed the door temporaril! BECOME(TEMPORARY(CLOSEDtthe

(I 1) DO(1. x(CAllSE(x,

for the sentenLs

door)),)))

Xi<’ postulates only three kinds of nodes in his semantic representations: S, NP. and V. A consequence of this is that almost all surface lexical items have to be derived from underlying predicates. In some cases, this simplistic approach leads to rather strange analyses. Adverbs belong to the most troublesome categories for the theory. Thu?, in ( IO), the adverb trmporaril~~ has to be analysed as a predl:ate whose only argument is the sentence C’los~d (the door). One of the unclear pcints in the interpretation of the semantic representations postulated by generative semanticists is what happens when a sentence is the argument of a predicate (see Bartsch/Vennemann 1’973) for a discussion of this prot,lemi. In some cases. the sentences are explicitly said to denote propositions (c.g. ( 1 IO). in other casts they seem to denote events lrnd ,;tatcs. Thus, the causing relation is said to hold between two events (344). Presumably. C’ioseti iflie door] would be a state. Then the interpretation of the two lowest clauses in ( 1 1 ) would be The dosed stutc of’ the door \t*as tonporary. However, the meaning of the whole thing would then be: ‘1 caused the closed state of the door to become temporary’. The most natural way of taking this appears to be that my actions influenced only the temporariness of the state. not the state itself, which is not what the actual sentence means. It is not clear that we cannot interpret ( 1 1) in another way, but what I have said shows how difficult it is to validate sernantic analyses within a theory of this kind. Leaving aside various minor misprints, the following remarks of a formal nature should be made: (a) Footnote d on p. 132 refers to a non-existing footnote of another paper. (h) Similarly. there is a reference on p. 127 to two non-existing example sentences. (c) On p. 264, immediately before ex. (37). [I)(* term ‘scope’ is used for what is earlier called ‘range’. Generally, it can be said that the hook is reasonably well edited. From the index of authors, some interesting statistics can be obtained. The most cited authors are as follows: George Eakoff (51 references), Nuam Chomsky (47 references). John R-Ibert Ross (46 references). These thiee leave all others very far behind: next i, turn are Paul Postal with 24 and Jerrold Katz with 17 mentions. We thus get L good picture of the relative importance of various linguists from the point of v‘iew of generative semantics. A certain amount of repetition is probably unavoidable in a book of this type, where a large number of papers that were earlier published separately are collected. The repetitiousness is enhanced by the fact that several of the papers are genernl expositions of the author’s views, as is witnessed by titles such as ‘The Role of Semantics in a Grammar’, ‘Meaning and the Description of Languages’ and ‘Semantic Representation’. In at least one case, there is a considerable overlap between two papers in the volume (p. 1 IO- I 13 and I40- 145 are partly literally identical). A more

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economical way of presentation would be to present a book which would synthesize the contents of all the papers, but that would of course have been a much more time-consuming task. One of the papers included is a 20-page review of a popular presentation of transformational grammar for teachers of English, published in 1966. McC notes (15) that the review “was rejected for publication on the grounds of being too long”. One feels that this judgment may have been well founded and that the volume would not have lost very much is the review had been omitted. Of course, there is much to be said on the positive side about this book. 1 have criticized generative semantics above for a number of shortcomings, but it should also be pointed out that this movement has had an important role in the development of Linguistics by making linguists in general aware of the importance of semantic and logical problems in the description of language. For many, transformational grammar became really interesting only with the appearance of generative semantics. James McCawley has played a crucial r,-\le in this process, and I think the popularity of generative semantics is at least partly due to the mere entertainment value of his papers. His style, which “owes as much to Lenny Bruce as to Leonard Bloomfield” (Zwicky et al. 197 1: vii), differs positively from that of some other scholars in the field. It is rumored that some people read McC’s papers exclusively for the example sentences where John, the protagonist of most texts in transformational grammar, has to yield the field to characters such as Lyndon, Nixon and Spiro. (The fact that the political careers of all these persons have already been cut short adds to the somewhat nostalgic feeling one gets,when reading the papers from the late sixties in 1975.) Some of these readers may also regret that McC’s writings under the pseudonym Quang Phuc Dong are not included in the volume; these are however easily available elsewhere (Zwicky et al. 1971). A full discussion of the wealth of problems treated in this book would of course demand a review at least as long as the book itself. In this review, I have concentrated on only a few points, leaving alone above all problems which are already outdated or whrch have been discussed at length in other places (by myself or other linguists).

References Bartsch, R., and Th. Vennemann, 1973. Semantic structures. Frankfurth/M; Athenaum. CressweLl, M.J., 1973. Logics and languages. London: Methuen. Dahl, 6., 1975. Constructivist semantics. In: E. Hovdhaugen (ed.), Papers from the Second Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, 113-125. Oslo. Dept. of Linguistics. Zwicky, A.M., P.H. Salus, R.L. Binnick and A.I. Vanek (eds.), 1971. Studies out in left field: Defamatory essays presented to James D. McCawley. Hdmonton/Champaign: Linguistic Research, Inc.