Part of this lists' usual semantics debate comes about because people here have
very different views about where complexity is to be found in grammar. For
example, on the whole And thinks that complexity is found at the
phonology-syntax (or phonology-syntacticosemantic) interface, whereas others
find it at the syntax semnatics interface. Obviously a lot of this comes down to
intellectual taste and before the event, philosophy of inquiry motivated,
position taking. Part of the issue concerns what idealisations we're making.
When And says that he wants to have lexical decomposition managed as relations
between *words* this is partly because he is highly tolerant in his theorising
of phonology-syntax mismatches, and higly intolerant of syntax-semantics
mismatches (which is partly why he takes his reductive view of semantics.
although this is also partly predicated on his anti-conceptualist stance). I am
relatively intolerant of phonology - syntax mismatches. I accept a certain
amount: you're forced to by phenomena like clitics and perhaps mixed categories
(though perhaps not the latter). But I am highly suspicious of highly mismatched
phonology - syntax relationships. You could, for example, quite logically end up
arguing that there were not necessarily any syntactic relationship word-order
rules (as the Burton-Roberts team do, I think) when the data make it look as
though there is a clear relationship between morphosyntax and word order.
Nik.
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