Greek Sentence Structure

Dave Washburn dwashbur at nyx.net
Thu Jul 26 11:23:34 EDT 2001


Randy,
It's not so much that something we can't define doesn't exist; it's 
more a case that something we can't define is fairly useless for 
doing grammatical/syntactical research.  Suppose I suggest a 
grammatical category "gerf."  And then I say "the gerf is the 
essential minimal syntactic unit."  When you ask me what a gerf 
is, I say "I can't really define it, but I know it's there" that's not 
going to give you much to go on for studying the nature of a gerf.  
So it is with the term "sentence."  In our language there is such a 
word, and it can be somewhat defined.  The problem is, for 
syntactical research, it isn't useful unless we can pin it down 
somehow the way we  can "clause."  Syntactically speaking (at 
least from a TG viewpoint) there is no such thing as a "compound 
clause"; a clause is a clause, and when you have two or more 
conjoined, that's what you have: two or more clauses.  Ditto for 
VP's.  Hence, for determining structure rules, transformations and 
the like, "clause" or "VP" is a much more useful term than the 
nebulous idea "sentence."  Does that clarify?

Moon,
The advantage of redefining "clause" as "VP" has to do with 
determining basic deep structure patterns and the transformations 
that map them onto surface structures.  Chomsky used the term 
"sentence" and others use the term "clause" because the subject 
is seen as a NP that is separate (in terms of phrase structure) from 
the VP; this is where I part company with Chomsky.  Someone 
emailed me privately and told me that Chomsky is moving in the 
direction of subordinating the subject under VP, and if that's 
correct, IMO he's making a needed correction to his approach.  I 
still can't buy his minimalism, though, because it seems like an 
elaborate shell game to me: he takes problematic items and moves 
them out of syntax proper into other compartments of his theory.  
Again, YMMV.

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
"You just keep thinking, Butch.  That's what you're good at."




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