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How to get even

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Stephen R. Anderson
Stephen R. Anderson*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Abstract

Various proposals for treating the word even in a transformational grammar of English are reviewed. It is shown that the word cannot be derived from a structure in which it is directly associated with that portion of the sentence which constitutes its semantic scope. An alternative account based on principles of interpretation of derived structure is sketched and motivated. The semantic content of the word is suggested as the source of limitations on its appearance within the sentence.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , December 1972 , pp. 893 - 906
Copyright
Copyright © 1972 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This work was supported by grant number GS-1934 from the NSF to Harvard University, and by the Language Research Foundation. I am indebted to Noam Chomsky, Janet Fodor, Bruce Fraser, and J. R. Ross for comments on earlier versions. Needless to say, they should not be held to agree with me about anything, nor to be responsible for my errors.

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