Basic Features of Automodular Analysis
Jerrold M. Sadock
(Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago)
This is the first of three presentations based on a book that is under consideration at Cambridge University press. The object of this book is to present an extensive analysis of English grammar in terms of a theory of grammar that radically separates grammatical description into several simultaneous grammars, each covering an informationally distinct level of analysis. These include a syntactic component that provides superficial phrase structure in terms of categories like NP, VP, and S, a function-argument structure component in which the description is in terms of semantic categories like arguments, predicates, and propositions, a morphological component where stems and morphological functions of them provide a description of words, and other components as well.
While there are important defaults matching expectations among representations in the various dimensions, they are merely defaults that can be overridden, resulting in mismatches of various kinds. In this model each component can be kept quite simple, complex grammatical phenomena arising from such mismatches. Automodular analysis can do without insertion and deletion, treating these as mismatches in which something represented in one component is absent in another. It also eschews movement of all kinds, recognizing instead that constituency and/or order in one component may not match constituency and/or order in another.
In these three talks I will have time to present only the simple phrase structure syntax and function-argument structure in any detail and show how complex facts like raising and control follow directly from disarmingly obvious descriptions of lexical items in these two modules. In the first talk I will present a straightforward syntax and an equally straightforward function-argument grammar, and discuss the correspondence principles that generally hold between them.
Special Note: Professor Sadock will give two further lectures on this topic in the Syntax/Semantics Group, as follows:
Lecture 2: Raising and Control, Friday, Feb. 22, 2 pm, PAR 10
Lecture 3: Life without PRO, Friday, Feb. 29, 2 pm, PAR 10
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