Paraphrase Grammars
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 ask
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FORMAL LINGUISTICS SERIES Editor: H. HIZ,
University of Pennsylvania
Consulting Editors: ZELLIG S. HARRIS,
University of Pennsylvania
HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD,
University of Pennsylvania
VOLUME 2
RICHARD M. SMABY
PARAPHRASE GRAMMARS
D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY
I DORDRECHT-HOLLAND
ISBN-13: 978-94-010-3340-4 001: 10.1007/978-94-0 I0-3338-1
e-ISBN-13: 978-94-010-3338-1
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 76-135104
All Rights Reserved Copyright © 1971 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1971 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher
PREFACE
The recent rapid development of transformational grammars has incorporated 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 transformational 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 independent 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. I criticize the theoretical viewpoint of Zellig Harris in an important respect - the idea that natural languages are basically "compositional", that is, can be defined in a recursive manner, like languages oflogic. However, more important are the aspects of his thinking I have accepted. I follow Harris' concept of a transformation as a mapping of a set into itself. When Harris applies this concept from abstract algebra to linguistics, it becomes a mapping from the set of sentences into itself. This concept of a transformation contrasts with that of Noam Chomsky, for whom transformations are mappings on the path from abstract grammatical structures to phonetic representations. Harris' transformations are designed to have direct empirical correlates, while Chomsky's are not so designed. My own desire for such an empirical correlate is due in part to Harris. His fundamental idea that a transformation is a syntactic operation which preserves co-occurrence relations I wholeheartedly endorse; but I appropriate this idea in the strictest sense and object to the attempt to reduce lengthy and complex co-occurrence relations to atoms of co-occurrence, or to introducing binary transformations, which do not simply prese
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