CHAPTER 1 Introduction
1.1 Some Historical and Methodological Backgrounds
Semantic Syntax is a formal theory of grammar, introducing an entirely new method of syntactic description. It takes a grammar to be a formal system map- ping well-motivated semantic analyses (SA’s) onto well-formed surface struc- tures of sentences. My claim is that no other formal grammatical theory has achieved the level of success reached by Semantic Syntax, which is unique in the way it accounts for, often so far unobserved, syntactic complications in the languages analysed in the terms of a unified theory. Grammars are, naturally, language-specific but it is a central tenet of Semantic Syntax that all grammars of individual languages or language varieties are subject to strong universal constraints. Consequently, it is a central concern of Semantic Syntax to search for those constraints, so that a maximally unified account can be provided of natural languages and their grammars. Semantic Syntax is characterised by the one overarching hypothesis that every sentence in every natural language is to be seen as a composition of prop- ositional structures (under a speech act operator), each consisting of a predi- cate and its argument terms. In its present form, this hypothesis goes back to James D. McCawley (1938–1999) but it is, in fact, the continuation of medi- eval and renaissance thinking about language, reaching a first apogee in the great work by the Salamanca professor Franciscus Sanctius, Minerva seu de Causis Linguae Latinae, published in 1587, and in Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot’s famous Grammaire générale et raisonnée, known as the Port Royal Grammar, published in Paris in 1660. McCawley reinvented this hypothesis in- dependently, on the basis of the principles he and others, including the pres- ent author, had worked out in the context of what was known, at the time, as Generative Semantics, a grammatical theory that had its origin in the early forms of Chomskyan generative grammar but deviated from that theory in that it sought to connect the formal properties of the sentences generated with their meanings. If one were to divide the history of Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG) into two main periods one would no doubt place the main break around 1970. Generative Semantics clearly belongs to the first period, and its lone off- shoot Semantic Syntax is therefore to be regarded as a continuation of that tra- dition. It is the result of a consistent application of most of the central notions developed in TGG from its first beginnings until about 1970. This first phase
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi ��.��63/9789004354296_002 2 CHAPTER 1 in the growth of TGG is characterized by relatively many dramatic and highly important developments, whose relevance and importance have tended to be played down or even ignored in much of the literature that has appeared since 1970. Since Semantic Syntax has much in common with dominant trends in TGG as it was until 1970, and hardly anything with its dominant trends after that year, it seems worthwhile to retrace the early developments in a quick survey.
1.1.1 The Birth of Generative Grammar and its Offshoot Semantic Syntax The origins of what has become known as TGG lie in the theory of grammar out- lined in Bloomfield’s book Language (1933). It was Leonard Bloomfield (1887– 1949) who introduced the now omnipresent tree structures into the theory of grammar. In taking hierarchically ordered constituent analyses, i.e. tree struc- tures, as the main notion in the analysis of linguistic structures, Bloomfield was inspired by Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), whom he greatly admired in his younger years and whose lectures he followed in 1913–1914. Although the struc- tural division of the sentence, or ‘proposition’, into a subject part and a predi- cate part is as old as Plato and Aristotle, if not older, it was not until the work of Wilhelm Wundt that this structural division began to be looked at as an actual structure consisting of constituent elements and thus representable as what we now call a tree structure. This would, in due time and through a complex interplay of ‘schools’ in theoretical linguistics, have a profound influence on, on the one hand, the later development of American linguistic structuralism, which, in principle, studied formal linguistic structures leaving, as much as possible, meaning out of account, and, on the other, on the development of the notion of grammar as a set of formal rules and principles converting meaning representations to surface structures of sentences—that is, to the notion un- derling the theory of Semantic Syntax. The story is complex and can only be narrated in rough outline. Wundt was, in the spirit of his day, driven by the ideal of a grand synthesis of psychology, linguistics and logic to account for the workings of the human mind, an ideal which he shared in principle with his illustrious American colleague William James. He defended the idea, considered less bold in his day than in ours, that binary branching represents a more advanced stage in the development of a language than multiple branching. He proposed the notion of tree structure as the basis of both linguistic and psychological structural analysis in various places, taking as the basic structure the old division into a subject and a predi- cate term, actually drawing, for the first time ever, the structures he had in mind (Wundt 1880: 53–71; 1900: vol.2, 320–355; 1901: 71–82).