Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/17/84; site bcsaic.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!houxm!mtuxo!mtunh!mtung!mtunf!ariel!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!fluke!ssc-vax!bcsaic!michaelm From: michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (michael b maxwell) Newsgroups: net.nlang Subject: Re: Singular/ Plural determiners in coordinate NPs Message-ID: <199@bcsaic.UUCP> Date: Tue, 30-Jul-85 18:17:04 EDT Article-I.D.: bcsaic.199 Posted: Tue Jul 30 18:17:04 1985 Date-Received: Sat, 3-Aug-85 03:22:47 EDT References: <177@bcsaic.UUCP>,<498@mmintl.UUCP>,<649@rlvd.UUCP>, <2188@sdcrdcf.UUCP>,<231@bbncc5.UUCP> Organization: Boeing Computer Services AI Center, Seattle Lines: 109 Let me try to reply to/ comment on some of the replies/ comments so far about the question of why "this man and woman" behaves like a plural NP wrt number agreement on the verb, but takes a singular determiner (this). First, <498@mmintl.UUCP> franka@mmintl.UUCP> (Frank Adams) comments that some of the NPs that I marked as ungrammatical, e.g.: >(5) ?*This/ *These/ The book and magazine are quite old. > *This/ *These/ The idea and presentation are both quite boring. > *This/ *These/ The apple and orange are good to eat. > ?*This/ *These/ The computer and screwdriver are for sale. > *This/ *These/ The story and movie are quite different. --sound quite fine to him. I think he's right that they aren't really *ungrammatical* (no visual pun intended!), but it seems to me (and to some other people that I've checked with) that they aren't quite as *natural* as e.g. "this man and woman." I suggested further down in my original posting that this might have to do with whether the coordinated nouns form some sort of a "gestalt" unit. In another reply <2188@sdcrdcf.UUCP> from lwall@sdcrdcf.UUCP, Larry Wall offers several examples of CONTEXTS where some of the coordinate NPs in the list above sound quite fine. I agree, and I think something interesting is going on there. As he says, >the nouns A and B must be in a context where they can be used to >indicate the basic unity of A and B. However, I don't agree that this implies in *any way* that "the traditional transformation representation of structure is totally inadequate to describe what's really going on inside someone's head." First, let me say that I'm a generative grammarian, but not a transformationalist. By virtue of being a generativist, Larry's comments definitely apply to me (i.e. I think that there are definite syntactic facts about language, apart from any semantic facts). At the risk of getting into a long burning digression, let me offer a simple example where analogy fails completely to describe language, and a syntactic explanation is obviously :-) needed. In English, the word "that" when used as a sentence introducer (COMP) is generally optional, at least after a certain class of verbs. I think (that) John left. Furthermore, you can wh-extract virtually any argument of a verb--subject, object, locative, etc: Who do you think _ left? Who do you think John saw _? Where do you think John put the car _? Who do you think Mary gave the book to _? Finally, in most cases you can wh-extract any argument regardless of whether the word "that" appears: Who do you think that John saw _? Where do you think that John put the car _? Who do you think that Mary gave the book to _? By analogy with these sentences, you can *obviously* wh-extract the subject when the word "that" appears. WRONG: *Who do you think that _ left? We have heard something like it before, and we know exactly what it would mean if it were grammatical, but it isn't! This can only be syntax (well, at least it can't be semantics). By the way, this phenomenon isn't restricted to the complementizer "that," nor is it restricted to English... although it doesn't pertain to a *syntactically* characterizable set of languages (French is like English, Spanish is not, etc.) There are a host of similar examples in language, which a reading of recent (past 25 years, especially past 10 years) of generative syntax literature will reveal. As for Larry's comment-- >Rules, shmules. We say it like that because we're used to hearing it like >that. Neurons are too slow to waste on a rule-based von Neuman approach. --there's nothing inherantly von Neuman about phrase structure or rules. I think that what the mixing of syntax and semantics etc. shows (as proposed by Chomsky, incidentally) is that there is a large set of mental abilities we have, all of which interact to determine which sentences (phrases) we find acceptable; syntax is one, and autonomous in the sense that properties of syntax are not derivable from properties of other systems. Back to coordinate NPs. In <649@rlvd.UUCP> drg@rlvd.UUCP (Duncan R. Gibson) suggests that >This/These x and y are ... is an "abbreviation" for >This x is ... *and* this y is ... At first, I liked the idea; but consider the following: This man and woman met last week. *This man met last week and this woman met last week. This sort of sentence is an example of why linguists no longer try to derive (transformationally) coordinated NPs from coordinated Ss. So unless you can define "abbreviation for" in some other way than "derived from", this won't work. In <231@bbncc5.UUCP>, keesan@bbncc5.UUCP (Morris M. Keesan) suggests that there is an elided article in the relevant NPs, e.g.: > This book and [this] magazine are quite old. > The story and [the] movie are quite different. This sounds quite plausible; at the moment I can't think of any arguments which would distinguish between this analysis and one that says that "this" or "that" is a sort of quantifier which has scope over both nouns in logical form. Can anyone else? Later in his message, Larry Wall suggests that the explanation for the fact that the determiner must be singular in-- >> (2) This/ *These king and queen... --is that: >there may be some "pressure" exerted by the fact that the listener who has >heard "These king and queen..." has already analyzed "king" and "queen" as >nouns functioning as adjectives, as in "These king and queen mattresses...". >In other words, if "these A and B" were admitted to the language there >would be much more possibility of "garden pathalogical" noun phrases. I'm not sure I understand this; "these A and B" is quite fine if at least A (and preferably B, too) is plural: these men and women And I've seldom heard "man" or "woman" used as an adjective or as the first part of a compound noun, so it's not clear to me how an adjectival interpretation would arise in "these man and woman" that would lead me astray... But it may be that I just don't understand what he means. -- Mike Maxwell