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English as a VSO Language

1970; Linguistic Society of America; Volume: 46; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/412279

1535-0665

James D. McCawley,

Natural Language Processing Techniques

1. A PREREQUISITE. To increase the likelihood of this paper's being intelligible, I will preface it with a brief summary (largely a restatement of results in unpublished papers by Ross and Lakoff) of an important notion that recurs in it, namely that of the CYCLE. I will assume in what follows that the transformational component of a grammar divides up into three sub-systems of rules: pre-cyclic transformations, the cycle, and post-cyclic transformations. I will ignore pre-cyclic transformations, since the one known pre-cyclic transformation (namely the sentence pronominalization which gives rise to the it of such sentences as Margaret is believed by many to be pregnant, but she denies it) is irrelevant to my argument. The rules of the cycle are ordered, as are the post-cyclic transformations. All the rules of the cycle apply in sequence first to the innermost sentence, then all the rules of the cycle apply to the next higher sentence, etc. Thus, an application of a rule of the cycle to an embedded sentence precedes all applications of that or any other cyclic transformation to the sentence in which it is embedded. The following illustrates the kind of grounds on which one can conclude that certain transformations have to be in the cycle. There is a transformation, called EQUI-NP-DELETION, which deletes the first noun phrase of an embedded clause if it matches a certain NP of the clause containing it, as in Max wants to drink a daiquiri, where the subject of drink has been deleted under identity with the subject of want (Fig. 1).1 There is another transformation (/known under a variety of names) which I will refer to as SUBJECT-RAISING; it applies to certain sentences containing an embedded clause, moving both the subject and the remainder of the embedded clause into the higher clause, as in Arthur seems to admire Spiro, which arises from an underlying structure in which seem is an intransitive verb whose subject is the sentence Arthur admires Spiro (Fig. 2). The interaction of these two transformations is seen in the sentences (1) Boris wants to seem to understand physics. (2) Boris seems to want to understand physics.