Formal Linguistics Series – serie

The recent rapid development of transformational grammars has incorpo­ rated some strong claims in the areas of semantics and co-occurrence. The earlier structuralists relied on a minimum of information about the meaning of strings of a language. They asked only if strings of sounds were different in meaning - or simply were different words or phrases. Current transfor­ mational grammars, on the other hand, set as their goal the production of exactly the meaningful strings of a language. Stated slightly differently, they wish to specify exactly which strings of a language can occur together (meaningfully) in a given order. The present book purports to show that transformational grammar is in­ dependent of the current trends in semantics. I claim that exciting and sophisticated transformational grammars are required for describing when strings of a language mean the same, that is, for describing when strings of a language are paraphrases of each other. This task can be quite naturally limited to a project of much weaker semantic claims than those which are current in transformational linguistics.

These separate but related essays owe their existence to a combined concern for the workings of text criticism and historical linguistics and for the history of scholarship in these fields. On earlier occasions I have suggested certain views on the development of the so-called comparative method. Few things are more rewarding than to bring implicit preconceptions of the past and present out into the open, as I aimed to do then and as I aim to do now. This time existing tradition is treated as a body - without, I hope, being seriously distorting - and one small portion of its working assumptions is examined. My thanks go to the colleagues and students with whom I have had fruitful discussion, but especially to Zellig S. Harris, and to Henry Hiz who expended much more than just his excellent editorial care on these efforts. I only hope that I have learned as much from him as he has patiently tried to teach me. Lloyd W. Daly has kindly read parts of an earlier version and has contri­ buted valuable suggestions.

These separate but related essays owe their existence to a combined concern for the workings of text criticism and historical linguistics and for the history of scholarship in these fields. On earlier occasions I have suggested certain views on the development of the so-called comparative method. Few things are more rewarding than to bring implicit preconceptions of the past and present out into the open, as I aimed to do then and as I aim to do now. This time existing tradition is treated as a body - without, I hope, being seriously distorting - and one small portion of its working assumptions is examined. My thanks go to the colleagues and students with whom I have had fruitful discussion, but especially to Zellig S. Harris, and to Henry Hiz who expended much more than just his excellent editorial care on these efforts. I only hope that I have learned as much from him as he has patiently tried to teach me. Lloyd W. Daly has kindly read parts of an earlier version and has contri­ buted valuable suggestions.

The recent rapid development of transformational grammars has incorpo­ rated some strong claims in the areas of semantics and co-occurrence. The earlier structuralists relied on a minimum of information about the meaning of strings of a language. They asked only if strings of sounds were different in meaning - or simply were different words or phrases. Current transfor­ mational grammars, on the other hand, set as their goal the production of exactly the meaningful strings of a language. Stated slightly differently, they wish to specify exactly which strings of a language can occur together (meaningfully) in a given order. The present book purports to show that transformational grammar is in­ dependent of the current trends in semantics. I claim that exciting and sophisticated transformational grammars are required for describing when strings of a language mean the same, that is, for describing when strings of a language are paraphrases of each other. This task can be quite naturally limited to a project of much weaker semantic claims than those which are current in transformational linguistics.