Syntax

The following was adapted from Ricardo Otheguy and Betsy Rodríguez-Bachiller, "Syntax Without Rules: The Effect of Positional Signals in the Placement of Extra Information". To appear in Contini-Morova, Robert Kirsner, Rodriguez-Bachiller (eds.) forthcoming.

One of the most intriguing ideas of the late William Diver was his deep skepticism regarding the existence of an autonomous syntactic component. Diver's position, stated often in his lectures and sketched out in some of his publications, has been echoed in the published writings of many of his followers (Diver 1977, 1982, Huffman 1997:188, 341, Reid 1991, and, for a summary, Contini-Morava 1995). The Diverian position holds that while it is certainly true that one can observe syntactic patterns, such as words being grouped in phrases or constituents, or constituents appearing in certain orders or displaying certain co-occurrence restrictions, these observations do not justify the postulation of autonomous syntactic constructs in the underlying grammar of the language. The Diverian grammar consists only of signs, that is, constructs made up of lexical or grammatical meanings and the signals that express them. It is true that analytical experience has shown that the signal side of a sign is in some cases a syntactic positioning of words or constituents. But aside from grammatical meanings signaled by positional signals, the grammar envisioned by Columbia School analysts does not have any syntactic content; there are no parameters and no settings, no phrase markers, no rules of order, no phrase-structure trees delineating initial structures, no movement rules, no constructions, and no blocking or filtering mechanisms that interact to specify the allowable order of constituents.

In Diver’s view, the incorrect belief that such constructs are part of the grammar of language derives from the a-priori nomenclaturist assumption that (a) the basic concepts proposed by traditional grammar to study the Sentence and its parts are essentially correct and, more importantly, that (b) the data for the study of language consist of complementary sets of grammatical and ungrammatical Sentences, and of relations within and between Sentences, all already conceived of, prior to analysis, through the theoretical categories of traditional, sentence-based grammar. In the absence of these unwarranted assumptions, so the argument goes, no justification remains for the postulation of a syntactic component, as most of the 'facts' that would motivate it become epiphenomenal. Diver wanted to admit as data for linguistic science only those facts that would unavoidably force themselves on observers unencumbered by the a-priori, nomenclaturist categories of the tradition.

But how to account for those compelling syntactic facts that do meet Diver's requirement? For surely, even under Diver's uniquely austere definition of the data of linguistics, there remain syntactic patterns of order and co-occurrence that need to be explained. In simplest terms, Columbia School linguistics posits no syntactic component because it believes that other, non-syntactic constructs—linguistic and non-linguistic—provide a better account of the syntactic facts. In general terms, Columbia School scholars explain syntactic order by appealing to a linguistic factor, namely the language-specific meanings of positional signals, and to a psycholinguistic factor, namely language-independent principles of discourse organization and processing. Some facts of order can be explained through the meanings of positional signals alone, others solely through psycholinguistic principles, while still others, perhaps the majority, through the interaction of positional signals and processing principles. But in any case, once a successful analysis has produced robust hypotheses on the meanings of positional signals and the substance of processing principles, and provided that what Diver regarded as pseudo-facts are set aside, the need for an autonomous syntactic component disappears.