No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
A Multiply Ambiguous Adjectival Construction in English
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2026
Extract
It has often been regretted that, while the methods of modern linguistics have achieved notable progress in the field of phonology, corresponding results for syntax have been considerably less impressive. At least one reason for the truth underlying this regret is undoubtedly the inability of the linguist to satisfy the very requirements which he himself has thought it necessary to impose on an adequate syntactic description. His persistent failure has resulted not so much, I think, from the lack of knowledge or insight into the nature of linguistic systems but rather in large measure from the unrealistic nature of these requirements.
Information
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 1960 Linguistic Society of America
References
1 This view is so widely accepted that there is little point in documenting it with citations. Furthermore, although my article is clearly in part polemic, it is not with any particular authors that I wish to take issue. However, lest it be thought that my interpretation of the dominant view in American linguistics is overly severe, I call attention to one single article, chosen simply because it so clearly and overtly states the dogma in question: Wallace L. Chafe, The Classification of Morphs in Seneca, Anthr. ling. 1:5.1–6 (1959). Chafe writes (page 1): “Let us assume that the utterances of a language have been successfully segmented into morphs … We now wish to classify these morphs into morphemes … I shall use the term morph, incidentally, to mean not a single occurrence, but a class of occurrences with the same meaning and shape.”
2 This view is clearly taken from the work of N. Chomsky and is advocated in greater detail in his own Syntactic structures ('s-Gravenhage, 1957), especially Chapters 1, 2, 6, and 9.
3 The structure of English (New York, 1952).
4 This is apparently the principal analytic device advocated by Smith and Trager as an extension of their otherwise putatively deductive phonological description of English.
5 Despite Hockett's ingenious attempt to extend morpheme-order chart diagrams to permit the representation of noncontiguous constituents and pro-morphemes. See A course in modern linguistics (New York, 1958), especially §17.6 and diagrams on 155, 253, 255. Some of the inadequacies of traditional doctrine are hinted at in Chapter 29.
6 See Chomsky, Syntactic structures, Chapter 5.
7 K. L. Pike, Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behavior (Glendale, Calif., 1954–5).
8 I have given a critique of his treatment of compounding and conception of syntactic structure in the preface to my forthcoming book, The grammar of English nominalizations (Baltimore, 1960).
9 See especially A Modern English grammar on historical principles: VI. Morphology (Copenhagen, 1942).
10 La phrase relative, problème de syntaxe générale, BSL 53.39–54 (1958).
11 Lees, op.cit., sections in Chapt. III on Infinitival Nominals and It-Inversions, where a more detailed treatment of the grammatical rules is given for the generation of these constructions.
12 Ibid., It-Inversions.
13 See Chomsky, Syntactic structures 75–84.
14 Lees, op.cit., section on Adjectivalizations.
15 Ibid., Chapt. II, Object.
16 Ibid., end of Chapt. III.
- 20
- Cited by