Dear And,
Sorry for the delay in reacting, and many thanks for the comments, which
Jasper and I will think about and build in when we have a chance to revise
the paper (though this will have to be a minor tinkering operation, as
we're up against an urgent deadline).
The issues you raise about DG vs PSG are ones that we've talked about
fairly extensively over the years, where I think we've more or less agreed
to differ. Whatever the relations between DG and PSG in the abstract may
be, all we're claiming is that their implementations in WG and CG are more
than notational variants. Maybe we should make that clearer in the paper.
Meanwhile the points that Joe makes in his message strike me as valid.
Re the WXDY (What's X doing Y? - e.g. What's your book doing on my desk?)
construction itself, I don't understand your criticism. As you say, the
heart of our analysis is/are the three sublexemes WHAT/wxdy, BE/wxdy,
DO/wxdy. (You need BE/wxdy as a link between the other two, so that DO/wxdy
will only occur as the complement of a BE that also has WHAT/wxdy as its
extractee.) Contrary to you (I don't accept your example) I think they're
tightly interdependent, so all three always co-occur. If so, we DO have an
'independent concept' of the WXDY construction - in fact, we have three of
them! Any one of these concepts could be taken as 'the WXDY construction',
because it leads unambiguously to all of the construction's properties.
Deciding which of these concepts is the 'real' WXDY construction
fortunately isn't a problem because constructions are just a
metaphenomenon, not part of the grammar, in WG.
Dick
Here are some highly truncated extracts from your message which seem most
relevant to my reply:
>(ii) To what extent are these sublexemes independent of each other?
>For example, "Are those magazines on the floor doing anything there?"
>would, if acceptable, suggest that WHAT/wxdy is not an essential ingredient.
>(iii) The analysis is making the implicit claim that we have no
independent concept of the WXDY construction per se;
>(iv) I gather that the CG criteria for recognizing a construction as a named
>component of the grammar are combinatorial.
Richard (= Dick) Hudson
Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London,
Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT.
+44(0)20 7679 3152; fax +44(0)20 7383 4108;
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
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