SEMANTIC AND TEXTUAL CONDITIONS ON NOUN PHRASE MOVEMENT IN ENGLISH (GENERATIVE GRAMMAR, CONSTRAINTS, COMPOSITION)

MARK STEPHEN LETOURNEAU, Purdue University

Abstract

Since the inception of the Standard Theory, it has generally been recognized that syntactic transformations must be severely constrained in their expressive power in order for linguistic descriptions to approach explanatory adequacy. To remedy this deficiency, various syntactic constraints on movement rules have been proposed. This program has not received unanimous support. Lakoff (1971) argues that transformations are too weak, not too strong, and that they must be supplemented by more powerful rules called global derivational constraints, which directly relate aspects of logical form such as topic and focus to surface structures. This study extends the class of constraints on movement rules to include semantic conditions which account for otherwise unexplained instances of illicit noun phrase movement without recourse to global derivational constraints. Local concatenative conditions are also presented to account for intersentential cohesion in texts contingent on the application of NP Movement. The thesis is organized as follows. Chapter One is a survey and assessment of the literature on constraints on transformations. Chomsky conditions and Emonds' Structure-Preserving Constraint are adopted. Lakoff's global derivational constraints are rejected as excessively powerful mechanisms. In Chapter Two, a generative model of text is developed. Text is defined as a linguistic level which is generated by mapping conjoined derived logical forms onto syntactic representations and which is itself mapped onto discourse, a text inserted into an appropriate rhetorical situation. Chapter Three expounds the conditions, which are shown to be motivated by such diverse semantic properties as thematic roles, quantification, modality, referential ambiguity, and functional sentence perspective. Chapter Four concludes with an incorporation of the conditions into the model proposed in Chapter Two, which is revised accordingly, and with applications of the conditions to native speaker and ESL composition theory and pedagogy.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

Linguistics

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