Paul M. Postal – författare

Paul Postal is a distinguished Research Professor at New York University whose specialties are syntactic theory, English syntax, and the foundations of linguistics. This volume consists of an introduction and two groups of essays, each with a connecting theme. The first, positive group, contains five previously unpublished studies of English syntax. These include a long study of so-called 'locative inversion', two investigations related to raising to non-subject status, an argument for the existence of a hitherto ignored nominal grammatical category and a study of vulgar negative polarity items. Each investigation of specific English details is argued to have significant theoretical consequences. The link between them is that each chapter reveals how much of even a well-studied language remains mysterious. Part One ends with a new theoretical essay that argues in a novel fashion for the controversial conclusion that it is literally impossible for a natural language to have a generative grammar due to a variety of theoretically neglected phenomena including so-called direct speech and metalinguistic uses. The second, negative group of papers, contains seven essays each of which seeks to show that aspects of contemporary linguistic activity are in part contaminated by elements of what is called 'junk linguistics'. Postal uses the term to denote work which advances proposals, puts forward claims and asserts deep results which, he argues, can only be accepted by ignoring serious standards of inquiry and scholarship. The fact that much of this work is nonetheless currently considered not only serious but prestigious reveals, Postal says, the problem to exist at the core of the field, not its periphery. These chapters include long, detailed studies of the strong crossover phenomenon and English passive structures as well as documentation of "junk linguistic" aspects in National Science Foundation refereeing, work on the foundations of linguistics, and even in widespread terminological usages. The negative section final chapter briefly lists personal suggestions for dealing with this problem.

In this important work of linguistic analysis, Paul M. Postal addresses a paradigm anomaly in French that has hitherto resisted explanation. A general restriction limiting the form of direct objects in complex infinitival constructions with main verbs like faire fails to hold with certain subordinate verbs, especially connaître. Marshaling extensive evidence, Postal argues that this apparent irregularity is a symptom of a deeper regularity. Rather than being an ordinary transitive complement, the subordinate clause in these cases is actually an Inversion structure, one in which the logical subject demotes to indirect object. However, since this demotion induces no word order change or other direct morphological consequences, the inversion is "masked," and revealed only by several types of apparent anomalies. This analysis has significant consequences for contemporary syntactic theories. First, the arguments support the view that a sentence's superficial structure cannot be identified with its syntactic structure, even though such an identification is a fundamental assumption of several currently influential grammatical frameworks. Second, even certain theories that do posit abstract aspects of grammatical form fail to allow for the needed Inversion structures. Postal's study supports theories based on the notion of arc and stratification into levels which provide a natural treatment consistent with the factual requirements. Masked Inversion in French is the first systematic account of this puzzling French syntactic anomaly, and its findings will stimulate research in many areas of natural language grammatical structure.

This collection of nine original syntactic studies carried out within the framework for syntactic theory and description known as Relational Grammar provides a state-of-the-art survey of this and allied fields. In relational theory, grammatical relations such as subject, direct object, and predicate are taken to be theoretical primitives which permit the definition of formal objects called Arcs, the fundamental building blocks of syntactic structures. Edited by Paul M. Postal and Brian D. Joseph, this volume is the third in a series highlighting work in Relational Grammar. It extends the foundational studies of the first two volumes to refine and modify the insights, analyses, and theoretical devices developed in earlier connections, while at the same time providing support for some of the earlier constructs and claims. Of the nine papers, four treat various aspects of advancements to and demotions from indirect object; three deal with raising and clause union constructions, in which initial immediate constituents of one structure are nonimmediate constituents of another; and two are concerned with problems in the description and formalization of verbal agreement systems. The nine articles cover languages ranging from Chamorro to English, French, Georgian, Greek, Japanese, Kek'chi, Korean, Southern Tiwa, Spanish, and Tzotzil.

Arc pair grammar is a new, extensively formalized, theory of the grammatical structure of natural languages. As an outgrowth of relational grammar, it constitutes a theoretical alternative to the long-dominant generative transformational approach to linguistics. In this work, David Johnson and Paul Postal offer the first comprehensive presentation of this theoretical framework, which provides entirely new notions of all the basic concepts of grammatical theory: sentence, language, rule, and grammar. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Arc pair grammar is a new, extensively formalized, theory of the grammatical structure of natural languages. As an outgrowth of relational grammar, it constitutes a theoretical alternative to the long-dominant generative transformational approach to linguistics. In this work, David Johnson and Paul Postal offer the first comprehensive presentation of this theoretical framework, which provides entirely new notions of all the basic concepts of grammatical theory: sentence, language, rule, and grammar. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This work examines Noam Chomsky's widely accepted ontological assumptions, now referred to as “biolinguistics”—and demonstrates that they are internally inconsistent. Notably, it is shown that Chomsky himself has at least once admitted this flaw. Additionally, the volume challenges a fundamental assumption from Chomsky’s 1950s linguistic writings. This is the claim that the grammars of natural languages, particularly of English, must be constructive (proof-theoretic) devices, usually called generative grammars. It is shown that this persistent view cannot in principal account for a multitude of linguistic structures realized as perfectly natural sentences.Finally, the work scrutinizes Chomsky’s frequent assertion that “there is essentially only one language spoken on Earth,” revealing it to have no actual substance.The exposition of these flaws calls for a reassessment of fundamental aspects of generative linguistics.

In this work, Paul M. Postal supports the universalist theory of language by examining passive clauses. Contrary to a skeptical tradition, Postal argues that passive clauses are cross-linguistically identifiable and characterizable. This study proposes refinements of the analysis of the natural language grammatical category Passive Clause. These refinements include an account of the notion 'dummy nominal,' central to the analysis of impersonal passive clauses; additions permitting a proper typology of the major known subtypes of Passive Clause; a generalization permitting application to clauses whose subjects are not earlier level direct objects; and, construction of precise rule concepts to represent restrictions on passive clauses.The passive domain supports the universalist approach in three distinguishable ways: (1) by permitting formulation of otherwise apparently unstatable lawful characteristics of all passive structures; (2) by facilitating statement of language-specific passive constraints holding in diverse languages; and, (3) by allowing uniform statement in grammars of recurrent constraints on passives. Each mode of support is applied to actual cases based on material from more than a dozen languages from English and French to Quiche (Mayan) and Chi-Mwi:ni (Bantu).