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On a class of not ungrammatical constructions1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

D. Terence Langendoen
D. Terence Langendoen
Affiliation:
Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center
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Extract

Langendoen and Bever (1973) contended that both expressions in (1) are ungrammatical in English, despite the acceptability of the first to native speakers of English.

(1) (a) a not unhappy person

(b) a not sad person

We came to this conclusion because we believed, first, that all grammars of natural languages should be subject to a constraint ‘M’ that no syntactic rule is able to make use of the morphological structure of lexemes (1973:402); and, second, that we had shown that no grammar that satisfies M can distinguish the grammaticality of(1a) from that of (1b). Our exact wording of M was as follows: ‘no syntactic transformational rule is permitted to make use of the internal morphological structure of lexical items’. Since the only syntactic rules of the standard theory, within which we were operating that are not transformations are base-categorial rules, which by definition make no use of the internal morphological structure of lexical items, the word ‘transformational’ in our formulation of M is unnecessary.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 1982 , pp. 107 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

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