James, On 19 Jun 2010 at 14:37, James Christian wrote:
> > Hi, by syntax I'm assuming you mean the constituent structure of the > sentence. e.g. things like: > S --> NP VP > VP --> V NP > NP --> (Det) N > In the LFG formalism such rules are referred to as the c-structure > of a sentence. What are your > feelings about functional distinctions? e.g. consider the following > sentences: > 1) Mary hit the dog on the head > 2) Mary hit the dog in the park > 3) Mary hit the dog on Monday > 4) Mary hit the dog on the head in the park on Monday > Sentences 1, 2 and 3 could be generated with similar c-structures > but the PP's in each clearly > have different functional meanings. That is to say that the PP in 1 > indicates the part of the dog > that was hit, the PP in 2 indicates where the dog was and the PP in > 3 indicates the time the dog > was hit such that we can combine the three different functions and > produce unambiguous > sentence 4. > For this reason I find a c-structure definition of PP's to be > inadequate. Different PP's clearly have > different functions. The most common functions being temporal PP's > and locative PP's. We even > see that there is some grammatical structure to the way that these > PP's can be used. Consider > the following sentences: > 5) Mary hit the dog on Monday on the head in the park > 6) Mary hit the dog in the park on Monday on the head > 7) Mary hit the dog on the head on Monday in the park > While the common meaning behind sentences 4, 5, 6 and 7 can be > extracted by a native > speaker of English some version of the sentence is more acceptable > than others as ranking > experiments would show. This is precisely why I go with a strict separation between syntax and semantics. The internal structure of the PP is the same regardless of what it "means": PP -> P NP This phrase structure rule (the same as your c-structure as far as I know, I just use an older term because I'm an older term myself ;-) describes virtually all prepositional phrases in BH. Once we start looking at function or meaning, we're out of the realm of syntax. Syntactically, 5, 6 and 7 differ in the order of the PP's and nothing else. The order of these PP's is determined by meaning/semantics, i.e. what makes the most "sense" to the speaker and hearer, but that is not a syntactic decision. Syntactically all three are well-formed: NP subject, VP predicate with NP direct object followed by a string of properly formed adjuncts (in this case, PP's). Does that clear it up? I believe this approach can be vastly useful for discovering a generative grammar of BH because it takes us down to the very basic structure of the language and, as you suggested in a separate post, works from the bottom up rather than the reverse. Dave Washburn http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
