Re: [tied] Re: verb agreement in one stage of English

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 10:37:12 +0000, Ray <ray28238317@...> wrote:

>> - Was the universal formulated by persons adhering to GB,
>Minimalism, or
>> some such framework? In a framework unhindered by INFL-nodes, we
>are free
>> to view both the auxiliary and the participle as constituent parts
>of "the
>> verb", as it is mentioned in the second formulation of the
>universal.
>
>That implicational universal was established decades before GB
>emerged. So the person who wrote down the universals(Joeseph
>Greenberg, maybe?) probably adhered to other framework other than GB,
>but I don't know the way he draws phrase structure trees.

It's hard to draw phrase structure trees when you're pushing up the
daisies...

But seriously, I don't think Joseph Greenberg did much phase structure tree
drawing, which is probably why he had the time to make a major breakthrough
such as his work on language universals.

>What I've found tricky about the issue is that we may view the matter
>differently depending on the framework we adopt.
>
>By the way, I want to know what syntactic framework treats the
>auxiliary and the verb as a whole, because I'm not familiar with
>other frameworks.

In what Dixon calls "Basic Linguistic Theory", "the fundamental theoretical
apparatus that underlies all work in describing languages and formulating
universals about the nature of human languages". It's what actual
descriptive grammars based on field work (or as Dixon says: "descriptive
grammars written by real linguists") are written in.

>> - What are the exact requirements of the universal? It is plainly
>the case
>> that Old English is not a language in which the verb agrees only
>with the
>> direct object. In fact, in the vast majority of sentences, the
>verb rather
>> agrees exclusively with the subject (e.g. "Ælfred kyning háte? grétan
>> Wærfer? biscep"). Is the universal formulated such that it should
>hold in
>> _every sentence_ or just in general?
>
>The idea about the implicational univesal is that there is a
>hierarchy of grammatical relations in human language with the more
>common(less marked) ones being in the higher level, and any process
>that applies to the relations in the lower level(such as indirect
>object) also applies to the relations in the higher level(such as
>direct object, in comparison).

I know. It's universal #45 from
<http://ling.uni-konstanz.de:591/Universals/introduction.html>.

But cf. universal #118, which makes kinda sorta the same requirement, but
for _every sentence_.


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...