research.att.comEditor for this issue: <>
tira.uchicago.edu>Adjectives: Robert Beard writes: "1b. Comparative and Superlative forms are never lexically negated because Comparison is an inflectional category and is therefore formed after lexical (L-) derivation. Evidence: many languages have an analytical comparative, _more happy_, _less happy_, which require syntactic structure. Since inflectional rules apply in syntax (please don't risk much of your career on the assumption that it doesn't), Comparison must apply after all L-derivation is complete. It follows that *un[happier] is impos- sible for the same reason that *_unbetter_, *_unsicker_, *_unfaster_, *_untaller_, etc. are." I will continue to risk my career by taking the position that morphology is morphology and syntax is syntax, and that inflection is morphology and not syntax. In a non-derivational system such as Autolexical Syntax there is no rule ordering, either explicit and stated as applying between components, or implicit and covert. There is much data in this set of posts, and I am not going to try to deal with it all in a quick note. But once again I find that major claims are made on the basis of data which involves grammaticality judgements which are by no means universal. Not only do I find My car is redder than orange. acceptable but if there is any oddity for other speakers I suspect it is semantic, since much money was spent on convincing us that our clothes could become Whiter than white! by using a certain detergent. My point is not that the data is flawed, or, as some would claim, grammaticality judgements are useless, but rather that theories which are built upon these judgements must have the flexibility to allow for the kinds of variations we find, and not insist that dialects which violate these supposedly universal rules are somehow "abnormal". If a theory can account for variation, either by using parameters or by keeping variation in the lexicon, fine. But I do find it uncomfortable to hear papers which imply that as a speaker of what might be described as a liberal New York dialect (both readings fine!), I am some sort of freak of nature with a defective language mechanism! Eric Schiller University of Chicago Note: this is not directed at any particular framework. In fact, my initial thoughts along these lines were inspired by Jim McCawley's syntax courses as a 1st year student at Chicago many years ago. Our judgements rarely matched on the complicated data, and I was constantly trying to think up derivations which allowed for my dialect. To the credit of his analytical framework, I usually could, though not always...Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
mbeya.research.att.com>In response to Greg Stump's and Robert Beard's postings on the _unhappier_ issue, I want to clarify a few issues. First, in response to Greg, I didn't think I was being glib in my response to the issue of whether _happier_ is scalar. Rather, I was trying to convey the sense of the term `scalar' that I was assuming. Quite possibly I wasn't successful in that attempt; I am perfectly prepared to accept the possibility that my assumption was too simplistic and ultimately wrong; and I fully accept the further possibility that I missed various subtle issues in Greg's response on this point. But by presenting a simple answer, I do not think I was being glib. And I agree that Greg's new examples do seem to suggest that _happier_ should not be considered scalar, at least not clearly so. As to whether this all means that my analysis of _unhappier_ becomes unworkable, I can only repeat for a third time my other piece of evidence, namely that contrary _un-_ means roughly the same as _the opposite of_, and that _John is happier than Bill, whereas Sam is the opposite (of happier than Bill))_ -- where _the opposite_ must presumably be `bracketed' outside _happier_, means that Sam is unhappier than Bill. In other words, the bracketing I proposed for the semantic interpretation of _[un [happier]]_ is at least consistent with the possibility of interpreting _un-_ in the strongest way possible, i.e., with the sense of _opposite of_. In response to my quibble about use of phrases like ``cease to be paradoxical'' Greg has the following to say: On the approach [Sproat] advocates, _unhappier_ is given a single structural analysis (viz. [ un [ happi er ]]), valid both for phonological and for semantic purposes; by contrast, cases like _uneasier_ and _slaphappier_ each have to have two different structural analyses ([ un [ easi er ]] and [ slap [ happi er ]] for phonological purposes, but [[ un easi ] er ] and [[ slap happi ] er ] for semantic purposes). Thus, the paradox remains, though in a somewhat disguised form: despite the obvious parallelism between the three expressions, _uneasier_ and _slaphappier_ have to be analyzed differently from _unhappier_. But note that my squib did not say that all three *have* to be analyzed differently: one would still get the right interpretation for _unhappier_ assuming the semantic bracketing _[[un happi]er]_, and if one can force that bracketing -- something Pesetsky was not able to do, for example, but something that would follow from Beard's points (see below) -- then there would be no problem. All I suggested was that it was not necessary to assume that bracketing in order to get the right interpretation. The problem with my assuming such complete freedom of brackeing, as I conceded in the previous posting, is that one could not explain why _uneasier_ does not mean the same as _harder_ (consistent with the bracketing _[un [easier]]_), but only has the interpretation consistent with the bracketing _[[uneasy] er]_. I concur that this is a problem if one does not assume that, one way or another, _-er_ must be interpreted `outside' _un-_; and however one chooses to derive this constraint would also necessarily derive _[[unhappy]er]_ as the only possible bracketing. Fine. Point taken. But if one *were* to allow the other bracketing, then I would still derive the correct interpretation for _unhappier_ (assuming my semantic analysis holds). Turning now to Beard's points, I agree that the assumption that inflectional rules apply in syntax and therefore after the application of derivational rules effectively rules out _[un [happier]]_ as a possible bracketing. Of course, I had thought the jury was still out on the issue of whether in fact inflection applies `in the syntax', at least on the more obvious interpretations of that phrase: presumably the fact that Anderson, Zwicky and others argue so strongly that it does is some indication that there must somewhere be a contingent of morphologists who aren't convinced. But as Beard suggests I won't ``risk much of [my] career on the assumption'' that inflection does not apply in the syntax (an odd injunction, since it is possible to be both well-respected and much-cited despite having made claims that are far more transparently false than that). Indeed, I will sidestep the issue slightly and say that I don't actually find very interesting the question of whether inflection should be separated from derivation or whether one should apply in the syntax and the other in the lexicon, but that I am perfectly prepared to believe that there are morphological operations like comparative -- call them inflectional if you wish -- that are sensitive to particular syntactic contexts and that therefore must apply after lexical operations like _un-_ affixation, which do not have the same kinds of syntactic sensitivity. In other words, I concede Beard's point. (Still I am puzzled by Beard's claim that "phonology has to work with [the structure _[[unhappy]er]_] and, as long as we are not trying to salvage lexical phonology, it can", since the paradoxicality of _unhappier_ never had anything to do with any of the issues raised by lexical phonology, unlike examples such as _ungrammaticality_.) And I think Beard's claim about the affixes with which productive `lexical' comparatives may be formed is an excellent one. It is certainly true that, given that the only disyllabic adjectives that productively allow _-er_ and _-est_ are (somehow) derived with _-y_ and _-ly_, adding _un-_ to the list does not cost much. In other words, _-er_ and _-est_ will attach productively to monosyllables, plus any monosyllables that (somehow) end in _-y_, _-ly_ or begin with _un-_. It's not clear that this is any more esthetically pleasing a solution than the claim that _-er_/_-est_ attaches to "all monosyllabic stems and disyllabic stems ending on an open syllable with a light vowel", which Beard dismisses, but at the very least it may not be any more costly. Still, I don't find everything that Beard says to be equally agreeable. First of all, I don't know if the differences between morphological theories are ``grander'' than I led people to believe: indeed, I wasn't presuming to lead people to believe anything about morphological theories in the large. And I don't think I said and I certainly did not mean that bracketing paradoxes are literally that -- *bracketing* paradoxes -- in all theories of morphology. All I said was that in all approaches to morphology where people have treated bracketing paradoxes _qua_ bracketing paradoxes, the authors have attempted to argue that their solution renders the constructions non-paradoxical, and that IN THOSE THEORIES WHERE ONE AT FIRST GLANCE SEEMS TO HAVE A PARADOX, the solution has always involved two levels of structure, or two levels of analysis. Of course if you have a theory where words don't have bracketings or anything equivalent, then none of this is an issue. Fine. But in theories where words *do* have bracketings, bracketing `paradoxes' are not a problem as long as one can motivate two levels of analysis at which these words have representations. Beard also asks a more pointed question about the viability of the notion that words have bracketings: it makes no sense, he claims, to say that one can bracket a word derived by infixation, revowelling, stem mutations, or (I infer) similar operations. The simple response to that idea is to assume, following various people such as Marantz, Lieber (i.e., her work on autosegmental morphology, and also her latest book), McCarthy and Prince, and others that apparently non-concatenative morphology can be understood if instead of mere concatenation, one allows into the inventory of options for the phonological spell out of morphology (its exponence, if you prefer) other kinds of autosegmental associations. Then the only difference between English prefixation and Tagalog infixation, for example, would be at the level of phonological spell out, not at the level of real morphological representation. I try to make exactly this point in my book _Morphology_and_Computation_ (1992 MIT Press), but other earlier work (including my own) has expressed this view. So while one may not, for various reasons, be satisfied with this answer, at the very least the idea of providing a bracketing for a morphological construct which on the surface involves, say, infixation is not as non-sensical as Beard implies. As for _cook_ and _baker_, as Beard contends, it probably doesn't make sense to assume parallel bracketings. But this seems like a desirable result, since the relationship between _cook_ (noun) and _cook_ (verb) is different from the relationship between _baker_ and _bake_ in one regard: while _baker_ seems to be able to assign _bake_'s arguments to an NP -- _baker of French pastries_ -- cook cannot: *_cook of French cuisine_. Zero-derived deverbal nouns (putting myself at some risk by using the term `zero-derived') usually don't seem to be able to assign the verb's roles -- at least not with _of_ complements -- and perhaps they should be formally distinguished from overtly derived forms like _baker_. To summarize this necessarily rather long-winded response: 1. Beard and Stump both present good reasons for thinking that the bracketing of _unhappier_ must be _[[un happi] er]_ after all. 2. Nonetheless, and noting Stump's points about scalarity, there is still some evidence that _unhappier_ should be interpreted correctly, even with the other bracketing -- and hence from a purely semantic point of view, it wasn't a particularly convincing example of a bracketing paradox in the first place. 3. There was some misunderstanding of what I actually said in my previous message, which I hope I have clarified. 4. Some of Beard's objections to bracketing-based theories of morphology should not be taken uncritically. Richard Sproat Linguistics Research Department AT&T Bell Laboratories tel (908) 582-5296 600 Mountain Avenue, Room 2d-451 fax (908) 582-7308 Murray Hill, NJ 07974 rwsMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue