While descriptive grammars are usually satisfied to list diagnostic tests for a particular lin-guistic entity without being bothered too much by conflicting evidence, formal theories such as the generative school of linguistics must find ways to cope with distributional mismatches in order to maintain the coherence and mathematical consistency of their syntactic analyses.
Both the extent to which exceptional cases are tolerated and the ways in which they are han-dled have changed considerably in the history of generative grammar.
Early generative theories such as the Standard Theory and the Extended Standard Theory (Chomsky 1957, 1965, 1975) sought to construct descriptively adequate syntactic derivations.
As a result, the empirical complexity of a language such as English was fully accepted and even unusual constructions were captured by specific, narrowly defined derivational rules (Grewendorf 2002: 98; Henry 2002: 8). In the course of this early phase, the goal of descrip-tive adequacy necessarily led to a steady increase in the number of syntactic rules. The ever greater complexity and variety of rule systems, however, soon came into conflict with the second basic principle of generative grammar, that of explanatory adequacy. Chomsky and his followers have always aspired to uncover general linguistic universals restricting the number of possible grammars so that the cognitive basis of the human language faculty could be ac-counted for (Linz 2002: 52).
The tensions between the conflicting demands of descriptive and explanatory adequacy have been alleviated from the so-called Government-and-Binding (GB) version of generative grammar onwards (Chomsky 1981) — much to the detriment of descriptive adequacy. The properties of language are now held to be invariant at some deeper level: "The natural way is to challenge the traditional assumption ... that a language is a complex system of rules, each specific to particular languages and particular grammatical constructions" (Chomsky 2000: 7).
Since the early 1980s, we can discern a general trend in generative scholarship to focus on abstract, universal principles of grammar that interact with a finite number of options or pa-rameters to yield specific syntactic constructions (Chomsky 1995: 6; Grewendorf 2002: 98;
Henry 2002: 275). The overriding concern of GB-theory is the formulation of those underly-ing principles, which are assumed to be organised in the form of separate modules or subtheo-ries that exert a constraining effect on one another (Grewendorf 2002: 13). The following dia-gram sketches the GB-model of generative dia-grammar and indicates the place the subtheories occupy within the overall framework:
Figure 1: The Government-and-Binding model of generative grammar
Phonological Form S-Structure Logical Form
D-Structure
Lexicon Categorial component
(adapted from Aarts 1992: 14 and Grewendorf 2002: 107)
The base comprises the lexical component, which contains entries specifying the form and meaning of words, and the categorial component, which determines the structural properties of the sentence according to the rules of X'-theory (for details see chapter 5.3). The insertion of lexical items into the structures generated by the categorial component results in an under-lying, abstract representation called D-structure, which conveys all the information pertaining to the thematic relations in the sentence (Grewendorf 2002: 106). This is the place where most of the subtheories come into play: according to the constraints imposed by these theories, the base structure is transformed into a corresponding surface representation (S-structure), which serves as input for the phonological component (Aarts 1992: 13-4). If interpretative demands of the subtheories make it necessary, the S-structure of the sentence is turned into a distinctive Logical Form (LF) representation that does not have phonological reflexes (Haegeman and Guéron 1999: 538-9).
This multi-stratal, modular architecture has fundamental implications for the treatment of specific syntactic constructions. The representational levels that are orthogonal to the theories (D-Structure, S-Structure, LF) represent the structure of the sentence in different forms, de-pending on the specific constraints imposed by subtheories at the respective point in the deri-vation. When the subtheories are held to be the regular, coherent substrate of the human lan-guage faculty, empirically observed constructions and distributional mismatches can be con-veniently explained away as superficial phenomena resulting from the interaction of conflict-ing syntactic modules (Croft 1991: 29). The exact workconflict-ings of this theoretical device with respect to secondary-predicate constructions will be laid out in chapter 5.3; at this point, a brief and rather straightforward illustration must suffice. To take up one of the distributional mismatches concerning the category 'direct object' encountered above: the putative direct ob-ject does not occupy the immediately postverbal position in the S-structure of the sentence John saw in the pub his old love Mary. Within the GB-model, this can be claimed to consti-tute only a superficial feature; at D-structure, the phrase his old love Mary is taken to be right-adjacent to the verb saw and thus to occupy the canonical direct object position (Haegeman and Guéron 1999: 222). In the transition from D-structure to S-structure, however, some
con-subtheories/constraints
straint having to do with phonological 'weight' or information structure forces the direct object to the right of the adverbial phrase in the pub (Haegeman and Guéron 1999: 222). Since a movement is thought to leave behind a co-indexed trace in the base position (Haegeman and Guéron 1999: 222), the 'landing-site' of the direct object remains related to its original posi-tion (John saw ti in the pub his old love Maryi). If diagnostic tests for discrete syntactic units such as 'direct object' are assumed to be met if they apply at some representational level or other, this sentence must no longer be considered a counter-example to the positional crite-rion.
This line of reasoning can accommodate the atomistic and discrete paradigm of grammar, but it runs into serious conceptual difficulties. The complexities of empirically observed con-structions can only be accounted for if a large number of constraints and levels of representa-tion are added to the system, "until one reaches the situarepresenta-tion of having a component for every rule or construction in the grammar" (Croft 1991: 28). Such a proliferation of theoretical components ultimately threatens the aim of explanatory adequacy which the GB-theory of grammar was originally intended to provide (Linz 2002: 214).
For this reason, Chomsky has tried hard to work against the isolating aspects of the GB-model, which the increasing tendency towards modularisation has created, by strengthening the integrative properties of the system (Sternefeld 1991: 3). These efforts finally resulted in the Minimalist Program (MP), which substituted some of the modular structure of grammar endorsed by GB-theory with an integrated derivational system (Chomsky 1995: 170). An in-depth exposition of the computational machinery of the MP is beyond the scope of this pa-per19, so I will only concentrate on the conceptual basis of this theory insofar as it is relevant to the present discussion. Chomsky demanded that the "'excess baggage' [of the GB-theories;
H.S.] is shed" (2000: 11) in order to pave the way for a much leaner version of universal grammar. As Jackendoff puts it, "[t]he goal is to posit the smallest toolkit that can still ac-count for the data" (2002: 76). Derivations are now measured against general scientific crite-ria such as economy, simplicity, or elegance; syntactic analyses that do not conform to these yardsticks are barred from the system (Chomsky 1995: 8-9; Grewendorf 2002: 100-1). Chom-sky argues that the "substantial idealisation" (1995: 7) imposed by such abstract criteria is not forced upon language, but exactly mirrors the nature of this human faculty:
19 Most publications of generative grammarians on secondary-predicate constructions are couched in the termi-nology of GB-theory and not in that of the MP, so I will predominantly refer to the former framework in later chapters. Since "the Minimalist Programme is a progression rather than a complete U-turn" (Cook and Newson 1996: 312), many of the arguments and analyses presented in a GB-framework still hold essentially true in the MP. More central deviations from GB-theoy will be indicated in the following discussions whenever necessary.
[W]e can ask how good the design is. How close does language come to what some super-engineer would construct ... there are even indications that the language faculty may be close to
"perfect" in this sense; if true, this is a surprising conclusion. (2000: 9)
My sense is that this conclusion is too surprising to be true, and it definitely runs counter to the distributional mismatches manifested by almost every linguistic phenomenon. Since Chomsky has chosen to reject the inelegant complexities of the GB-model, the only way to uphold the notion of language as "something like a 'perfect' system" (1995: 1) is to focus on very general, abstract rules and constraints and to ignore the empirical variability of language.
This seems to be the direction that Chomsky's grammar has headed into when we consider his claim that, in contrast to abstract principles, "constructions are ... taxonomic artifacts, useful for informal description perhaps but with no theoretical standing" (2000: 8). A telling sign of Chomsky's policy of idealisation is the terminological distinction between 'I(nternalized)-language', the static system of universal grammar, and 'E(xternalized)-'I(nternalized)-language', i.e. actually observed language data (Chomsky 1995: 15, 2000: 123; Cook and Newson 1996: 21). Chom-sky has always characterised the latter as "epiphenomenal" (1980: 83) and not worth the lin-guist's attention. Generative grammar may have managed to defend its discrete, atomistic paradigm, but only at the cost of narrowing the scope of syntax to just a few core linguistic phenomena. Anything that cannot be captured by abstract, construction-independent princi-ples is relegated to some grammatical periphery that is usually identified with the lexicon, which Chomsky characterises as "a list of 'exceptions', whatever does not follow from general principles" (1995: 235). The lexicon has thus become "the last receptacle of all idiosyncratic information" (Goldberg 1995: 22) within an artificially perfect grammatical system.
In my view, the conceptual foundations of the MP are gratuitous and rather dubious; it is therefore high time to accept the empirical fact that "[m]aximally general categories and rules are highly likely not to be psychologically real; hence the search for maximally general analy-ses is probably a search for an empirically nonexistent — that is, a fictional — entity" (Croft 2001: 5). How far removed contemporary generative grammar is from the linguistic reality becomes clear in the grand programmatic words of the German generative grammarian Sternefeld:
Wie in der Physik bemißt sich das Ziel der Universalgrammatik nämlich an ihrem Erfolg, sich sozusagen einer "Weltformel" anzunähern, welche die vielfältigen Existenzformen des Kosmos (und der Sprache) wie aus dem Urknall heraus abzuleiten vermag. (1991: 2)
For anyone interested in explanations of actual linguistic phenomena, such a quest for meta-principles is certainly not the right way to go. The following chapter will therefore look at an alternative, non-discrete view of syntax.