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An Introduction to Transformational Syntax Roger
Fowler Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Roger Fowler
ISBN(s): 9781138207639, 1138207632
Edition: Reprint
File Details: PDF, 17.58 MB
Year: 2016
Language: english
 ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITION:
SYNTAX

Volume 9

AN INTRODUCTION TO
TRANSFORMATIONAL SYNTAX
C\
~-
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
http:// tayl ora ndfra nci s.com
 AN INTRODUCTION TO
TRANSFORMATIONAL SYNTAX

ROGER FOWLER
First published in 1971 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.
This edition first published in 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 1971 Roger Fowler
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-138-21859-8 (Set)

ISBN: 978-1-315-43729-3 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-20763-9 (Volume 9) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-46149-6 (Volume 9) (ebk)

Publisher’s Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but
points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.
Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome
correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.
 Roger
Roger Fowler
Fowler

AnAn introduction
introduction to to
TransformationalSyntax
Transformational Syntax

Routledge & Kegan Paul London

Routledge & Kegan Paul London
 First published in Great Britain 1971
by Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.
Broadway House
68-74 Carter Lane
London, EC4V SEL
Printed in Great Britain by
The Camelot Press Ltd
London & Southampton
and set in Monotype Times New Roman,
10 point, 1 point leaded
© Roger Fowler, 1971
No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission from the
publisher, except for the quotation of
brief passages in criticism

ISBN 0 7100 6975 8 (c)

ISBN 0 7100 6976 6 (p)
 Contents

Preface vii
one What is a Grammar? 1
two Deep and Surface Structure 10
three Coostituent Structure: 8yntaetic FunctioDS 21
four CODStitaent Structure: Categories and DerivatioDS 35
five Lexical InterpretatioD 49
six Deixis: Det and Au 61
seven DerivatioD of a Simple 8eDtence 77
eight Negatives, Passives, QaestiODS and Similar Structures 85
nine Pro-forms 100
ten Complex Senteaees 115
eleven Some NomiaaHzatioDS 129
twelve Relative Clauses and Adjectives Relisited 139
thirteen CoDjoiDing Tnmsformatioos ISO
fourteen Postscript: LiDgaistic Universals and the Nature
of Grammatical DescriptioDS 164
Selected Reading 174
Index 177
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
http://taylorandfrancis.com
 Preface

This is a textbook on transformational-generative syntax, a mode of

grammatical description proposed by the American linguist Noam
Chomsky in a little book called Syntactic Structures published in
1957. Since that time, TG, as it has come to be called, has undergone
massive growth and change. In the first place, its general framework
has become accepted by the majority of Western linguists as provid-
ing the most reliable and revealing version of linguistic analysis. This
fact has to be acknowledged despite intractable opposition from a
few representatives of older schools of linguistics or of more insular
traditions; and despite many disagreements about details of the
proposed analysis. Second, TG has benefited from very substantial
and useful revisions over the years.
The net consequence of these developments is that, although there
is an increasingly wide demand for information on TG, current
writings in the field are forbiddingly specialized and somewhat dis-
putatious, and the older books have become somewhat out of date.
Available elementary textbooks fall into two categories: there are
those which were published in the early and mid-1960s, and project
a version of TG which is not entirely consonant with more recent
statements of the approach; and there are newer books~ an increas-
ing number - which embody fragments of contemporary revisions in
what is sometimes a puzzling way. I have attempted to provide a
'compromise' account. The primary intention is to describe a
transformational model of syntax which is more up to date than the
classic textbooks, based as they are on Syntactic Structures, can
provide. In essence, this means incorporating the general changes
announced in Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) and
foreshadowed in Katz and Postal's Integrated Theory of Linguistic
vii
 Preface
Descriptions (1964). At the same time, I have tried to avoid making
Syntactic Structures 'unreadable' through uncompromising para-
phrase of Aspects: I assume that any student who uses the present
book as a way of gaining access to contemporary syntactic theory
will be interested enough to read Syntactic Structures, which, though
now superseded in many respects, remains the most succinct,
powerful and attractive argument for a transformational approach
to syntax.
Readers who are familiar with the history of TG will soon realize
that the present book is not a faithful paraphrase of Aspects. I
would claim that it builds on the basic framework of that account -
although even that claim may be controversial. Prematurely, I feel,
the whole position of Aspects is under attack from some quarters.
What I have tried to do is tidy up such contradictions and omissions
as appear in Aspects without, in my opinion, invalidating the overall
position. In an attempt to reflect contemporary work I have gone
beyond the letter of Aspects (hence my reading of it could be called
inaccurate) in several respects: a more extensive use of feature
analysis in syntax, and, in particular, a new treatment of Det and Aux
which is not envisaged in Aspects. Beyond this up-dating of Aspects, I
have tried to indicate directions of subsequent enquiry by other
grammarians: for this reason, my treatment of pronouns, relative
and appositive clauses, and conjoining has been worded in a tentative
and open-ended way - these are current preoccupations in syntactic
research and I want to suggest that further rethinking in these areas
may bring important and radical revisions to the very basis of the
grammar.
The grammar presented here, then, is by no stretch of the imagina-
tion 'final': it is a provisional grammar designed to help students
read both classic and contemporary writings in TG. Certain obvious
limitations of the present model of syntax make it clear that it is quite
provisional: I would point especially to the difficulty of explaining
adverbials and phrasal conjunction in this version of transforma-
tional syntax. A student who realizes just what these particular
difficulties are will be well equipped to evaluate both older and newer
solutions to such problems.
A word on how this book is to be read. It is a textbook and an
instrument, to be used rather than consulted. The material is
presented sequentially, with modifications en route, and so it should
be read slowly, from beginning to end. It is not a reference book, and,
to discourage its use as such, the index is minimal. I assume that the
book will normally be used in a taught course, in conjunction with
other reading materials. At the end of the book there is a short
reading list: this reflects a range of important books and articles
viii
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
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 one

What is a Grammar?

The word 'grammar' in present-day linguistics has at least two

important meanings. On the one hand, we say that a speaker knows
the grammar of his language. He usually does not know it con-
sciously -unless he has some special training in linguistics, he cannot
talk confidently about the nature of his grammar. A grammar in this
first sense comprises the linguistic knowledge speakers possess which
enables them to communicate in their language. 'Grammar' here is a
psychological, mentalistic, concept. The second sense relates to the
linguist, not to the speaker: the linguist is said to write a grammar
of the language. This grammar is a formal, explicit, description of the
language.
Now these two usages must be kept apart. One look at a printed
grammar is enough to convince us that it is extremely unlikely that
the speaker knows his grammar as an object of the shape the linguist
provides when he writes his grammar. If we could magically 'tap'
the speaker's hidden linguistic knowledge - by hypnosis, drugs or
whatever other implausible technique - so that he could tell us
directly what it is that he knows which we refer to as 'his grammar',
he would not simply dictate Jespersen's Modern English Grammar or
Chomsky's Syntactic Structures to us. The speaker docs not store
his linguistic knowledge in the format which the linguist adopts for
explanatory purposes; nor, when he produces sentences, does he
follow step-by-step the processes which the linguist spells out as he
constructs derivations for sentences. This latter point is most
important, and I will return to it: a linguist's grammar generates
sentences; a speaker produces (and understands) sentences- the two
processes are quite independent.
Although the two senses of 'grammar' must be dissociated, we can
1
 What is a Grammar?
learn a lot about how to write a grammar, and what to put in it,
by speculating on the nature of the grammatical knowledge of
speakers. We can profitably ask: what must a speaker-hearer know
in order to communicate in his language? If we observe linguistic
behaviour from a number of angles, we can begin to make observa-
tions which encourage us to predict certain necessary components of
grammatical knowledge. First, native speakers know that, of the
following three sentences, (I) is not a sentence of English, (2) is an
ungrammatical sentence of English, (3) is a grammatical sentence of
English:
(l) Quel est !'objet ala fois integral et concret de Ia linguistique?
(2) Three tons are weighed by this truck.
(3) This truck weighs three tons.
To go into more detail, they know more about ungrammatical
sentences; for example, that (4), (5), (6) and (7) are progressively
more deviant:
(4) This circle is square.
(5) John alarmed an apple.
(6) John alarmed a the.
(7) Alarmed a the John.
More relevantly, perhaps, they know an enormous amount about
grammatical sentences of English. For example, they know that
(8) and (9) are similar in meaning, as are (10), (11) and (12) and, in
a different way, (13) and (14):
(8) Her frankness astonished him.
(9) He was astonished by her frankness.
(1 0) The carpet was brown.
(11) The brown carpet ...
(12) The carpet which was brown ...
(13) He mounted his proud horse.
(14) He mounted his proud steed.
It goes without saying, of course, that speakers know which sentences
are different, as well as which ones are alike. That is, they can tell
sentences apart. This observation needs no illustration at this point,
since the book as a whole is a discourse upon it.
Another area of linguistic knowledge concerns ambiguous sen-
tences. Consider the following two examples:
(15) The chicken is·ready to eat.
(16) I saw her in the street.
(15) can be associated with either 'X eats the chicken' or 'the chicken
2
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