Chomsky’s three levels of adequacy

Smith and Wilson (1979: 241–2) provide a good example of Chomsky’s three levels of adequacy. In the case of what is known as WH-movement, a noun following a WH- word can be moved to the front of a sentence:

1 Mary met some tourist on the street.

1b Which tourist did Mary meet on the street?

But this movement is not possible for a noun in a co-ordinated NP of the form ‘X and Y’:

2 Mary met a policeman and some tourist on the street.

2b *Which tourist did Mary meet a policeman and on the street?

An observationally adequate grammar would merely state that WH-movement does not allow extraction of a noun or noun-phrase from a co-ordinated structure, but in doing so it might miss a more important generalization, namely that the same constraint also applies elsewhere. Movement from a conjoined NP is similarly ruled out in topicalization, for example:

3 I want to invite that boy to my party

3b That boy, I want to invite to my party.

4 I want to invite this girl and that boy to my party

4b This girl and that boy, I want to invite to my party

4c *That boy, I want to invite this girl and to my party.

A descriptively adequate grammar of English would therefore state that no rule of English – and, equally importantly, no possible rule of English – allows movement out of a co-ordinated NP. But an explanatorily adequate grammar of English would not specify the rule at all, because it seems to be a feature of universal grammar. Movement from co-ordinated NPs appears to be ruled out in other languages, with no known counter-examples:

French:

J’aime beaucoup ton frère et ta sœur ‘I like your brother and your sister’

*Ta sœur, j’aime beaucoup ton frère et *‘Your sister, I like your sister and’

Russian:

Ja vidjel Pavla i Sonju ‘I saw Pavel and Sonya’

*Sonju ja vidjel Pavla i *‘Sonya I saw Pavel and’

Nupe (Nigeria):

egi-zì gí yikã tò n`â? ‘(The) children ate fish and meat’

*n¯ak`â kíci egi-zì gí yikã tò o? *‘meat which children eat fish and’ (*‘Which meat did the children eat fish and’?)

مواضيع ذات صلة

Language Mixture—Grammar

Change in grammar and pronunciation

Word order

Grammaticalization.

Convergence in the Balkans

Did we lose the perfect tense already?

It’s grammaticalization, innit?

Haugen’s model

Diglossia

Language shift and language death

Stratification and hypercorrection

Exploring variation in language