Abstract
From an attempt to isolate the independent elements of sentence construction, we arrive at two different and separately acting grammatical systems, which contribute to this construction: a system of predicates (with and, or) and a system which can be considered an extension of morphophonemics (which is change purely of phonemic sequences). The predicate system carries all the objective information in the sentence, and the most natural interpretation of its structure is that of giving a report. The morphophonemic system is interpretable as being paraphrastic, and changes at most the speaker’s or hearer’s relation to the report. The grammar of the language as a whole is simply the resultant of these two systems.
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Notes
An operator Xyz (Y, Z) is defined as acting on certain arguments Y, Z (written as subscripts), i. e. on certain variables on which it imposes a partial ordering of values. A sentence is produced by the words of an operator A being concatenated with the words of its argument B; and the words of argument B being in turn concatenated with the words of its argument C, if B have any C; and so on. In the sentence, the word-string produced by the arguments B of A together with the arguments C of B, and so on, are the operand of A.
A sentence-form is a sequence of variables and constants, the constants being particular morphemes and the variables being symbols for word-(or morpheme-) classes. The words in the class constitute the domain of the variable. Replacing the n independent variables of a sentence-form by an n-tuple of values from the stated domains produces a sentence S of that sentence-form.
In the initial condition, A is not a sentence-set but a set of N-arguments, and in B the Xm is not an increment but the predicate of an elementary sentence (7.2).
Here A is the source of B*, written A→B*, on the general grounds of transformational analysis (Z. Harris, Mathematical Structures of Language, Interscience Tracts in Mathematics, Vol. 21, Wiley, New York, 1968, p. 62–3).
Op. cit. note 3, §§ 5.4, 5.6. 3-4.
Also, the sense of an ongoing act in the special use of being before adjectives and nouns (He is being clever, He is being a man) is seen in the other form: His being clever is in process, His being a man in in process (is something going on).
Also by the fact that this finally makes it possible to derive all occurrences of-ing from a single source.
Richard I. Kittredge, Transformations and Discourse Analysis Papers, University of Penn-sylvania 1969. The classifications ‘perfective’ and ‘imperfective’, introduced in this connection by Kittredge, are used here tentatively, pending further investigation.
In the sentence after than (or as) parentheses indicate optional zeroing; but if a word of that sentence is omitted then this is due to required zeroing.
The comparative-conjunction form is also obtained when the quantified words in the two source sentences have different positions, provided that they are the same word so that the second occurrence has been zeroed: The number of men who read books is more than (the number of men whom) you can count. More men read books than you can count.
The nearest we come to this is the makeshift and semantically unclear More men read books than there are magazines which women read. A more acceptable situation of this type is seen in (6).
Sn indicates nominalized sentences. The subscripts identify the sentences.
That the subjunctive does not bring in independent morphemes but only a form that is automatic in respect to its operator is seen in the fact that a subjunctive occurrence of a sentence can be zeroed as a repetition of a non-subjunctive occurrence of that sentence: He opposed it more than I expected (that he would oppose it). For the parenthesized segment to be zeroed, it must consist only of its antecedent (the segment, aside from tense, in He opposed it) plus entities that are determined by (and reconstructed from) the residual I expected.
I. e. its battery of transformations in the sense of H. Hiz, ‘Congrammaticality, Batteries of Transformations, and Grammatical Categories’, in Proceedings, Symposium in Applied Mathematics 12, American Mathematical Society, 1961, 43-50. The view presented in this section is close to that reached on other grounds by A. K. Joshi in his Properties of Formal Grammars with mixed types of rules and their linguistic relevance (University of Pennsylvania 1969), and in A. K. Joshi, S. R. Kosaraju, H. Yamada, String Adjunct Grammars, Trans-formations and Discourse Analysis Papers 75 (University of Pennsylvania 1968). Both Mr. Hiz and Mr. Joshi have also contributed valuable criticisms to the present paper.
Beverly Levin Robbins, The Definite Article in English Transformations, Papers on Formal Linguistics, Mouton, The Hague, 1968.
Since it will be seen that move is the argument of try, and dog is the argument of move (7.1), this means that try would have a domain restriction on the argument of its argument.
This cannot be derived from N gathered and N gathered and N gathered because of the restriction of gather to Ncoll.
H. Hiż, Referentials, Semiotica, Vol. I, 2 (1969), 136–166.
Sh should be obtainable from Si by recognizing the trace of Tj, removing incrementi and Tj, and reapplying incrementi It has to be shown that the increment can always be applied even without the intermediate T, and that its meaning effect is then unchanged.
As was noted by Edward Sapir in his paper ‘Grading’ in D. G. Mandelbaum (ed.), Selected Writings of Edward Sapir, University of California 1958, p. 122ff.
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Harris, Z.S. (1970). The Two Systems of Grammar: Report and Paraphrase. In: Papers in Structural and Transformational Linguistics. Formal Linguistics Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-6059-1_30
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