Geoffrey K Pullum
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 89056 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Geoffrey K Pullum |
| PRENOMES | Geoffrey K |
| SOBRENOME | Pullum |
| ASSINATURA | PULLUM G K |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7748-8847 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 80 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 244 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 76 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 4 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1973 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
The prehistory of generative grammar and Chomsky's debt to Emil Post
Generative linguistics has a longer prehistory than most linguists realize. The rewriting systems that Chomsky brought into linguistics as generative grammars were explicitly defined more than a century ago, as part of a project to formalize inference rules in logic, and were later applied to studying mathematical properties of certain kinds of infinite sets. Their developer was the mathematician and logician Emil Leon Post, whose work was inspir…
The Rise of English
The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language Rosemary Salomone (2022) New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 485ISBN: 9780190625610 (hbk) ISBN: 0190625619 (eBook)
Theorizing about the Syntax of Human Language
Linguists standardly assume that a grammar is a formal system that 'generates' a set of derivations. But this is not the only way to formalize grammars. I sketch a different basis for syntactic theory: model-theoretic syntax (MTS). It defines grammars as finite sets of statements that are true (or false) in certain kinds of structure (finite labeled graphs such as trees). Such statements provide a direct description of syntactic structure. Genera…
Lessons from the English auxiliary system
The English auxiliary system exhibits many lexical exceptions and subregularities, and considerable dialectal variation, all of which are frequently omitted from generative analyses and discussions. This paper presents a detailed, movement-free account of the English Auxiliary System within Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2010, Michaelis 2011, Boas & Sag 2012) that utilizes techniques of lexicalist and construction-based analysis. The result…
Fear and loathing of the English passive
Anaphoric one and its implications
The nominal anaphoric element one has figured prominently in discussions of linguistic nativism because of an important argument advanced by C. L. Baker (1978). His argument has been frequently cited within the cognitive and linguistic sciences, and has provided the topic for a chain of experimental and computational psycholinguistics papers. Baker's crucial grammaticality facts, though much repeated in the literature, have not been critically in…
Handbook Amazonian Languages
The Land of the Free and The Elements of Style
The Elements of Style (henceforth, Elements ) is a slender book of advice on usage and writing, revised by the admired novelist and essayist E. B. White from a book by his former English professor. White did well to accept Macmillan's suggestion that he should revise and expand his former professor's book for commercial republication: successive editions of the revision sold over ten million copies. Many college-educated Americans revere Elements…
The distribution and category status of adjectives and adverbs
It has long been argued that the environments in which adjectives and adverbs occur are mutually exclusive. This claim is based on a superficial observation that adjectives modify nouns, while adverbs modify other categories. In this paper, we argue that there are a substantial number of environments in English where complementarity, thus defined, does not hold. One interesting such environment is the function of modifier of nouns, and in one sec…
Letters to Language
Letters to Language Geoffrey K. Pullum and Stephen R. Anderson Language accepts letters from readers that briefly and succinctly respond to or comment upon either material published previously in the journal or issues deemed of importance to the field. The editor reserves the right to edit letters as needed. Brief replies from relevant parties are included as warranted. Response to Anderson February 16, 2009 To the Editor: In the article derived …
Tracking the origins of transformational generative grammar
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Fusion of functions
In this paper we present a detailed new analysis of the English expressions once , twice and thrice . These, we claim, are primarily compound determinatives, analogous in many respects to expressions like someone and somewhere . The new analysis exploits the framework of the Cambridge grammar of the English language (2002) in which the morphological nature of the compound determinative category reflects a fusion of functions, typically determiner…
Some remarks about The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language
This book presents a new and comprehensive descriptive grammar of English, written by the principal authors in collaboration with an international research team of a dozen linguists in five countries. It represents a major advance over previous grammars by virtue of drawing systematically on the linguistic research carried out on English during the last forty years. It incorporates insights from the theoretical literature but presents them in a w…
Adjectives and adverbs
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Model theory and the content of OT constraints
We develop an extensible description logic for stating the content of optimality-theoretic constraints in phonology, and specify a class of structures for interpreting it. The aim is a transparent formalisation of OT. We show how to state a wide range of constraints, including markedness, input–output faithfulness and base–reduplicant faithfulness. However, output–output correspondence and ‘intercandidate’ sympathy are revealed to be problematic:…
Searching for arguments to support linguistic nativism
c©Walter de Gruyter Few arguments are more dangerous than the ones that feel right but cant be justiÞed. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (1981: 157) 1
Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments
This article examines a type of argument for linguistic nativism that takes the following form: (i) a fact about some natural language is exhibited that allegedly could not be learned from experience without access to a certain kind of (positive) data; (ii) it is claimed that data of the type in question are not found in normal linguistic experience; hence (iii) it is concluded that people cannot be learning the language from mere exposure to lan…
An Introduction to the Languages of the World
An Introduction to the Languages of the World is a text designed to introduce beginning linguistics students, who now typically come to their study with little background in languages, to the variety of the languages of the world. Lyovin begins by explaining the classification of languages, discussing not only genetic classification but typological and sociolinguistic classification as well. He follows this with an explication of the classificati…
Short Report
In this article we consider the relationship between phonetic possibility and phonological permissibility of segment types. We ask (i) are any phonetically impossible segments phonologically permissible? and (ii) are any phonetically possible segments phonologically impermissible? Our main focus is on answering (ii). We analyze the implications of the only relevant case we can find, which is in Cohn's (1990, 1993a) examination of nasality spreadi…
Vowel Charts and Central Vowel Transcriptions in American and IPA Traditions
Vowel Charts and Central Vowel Transcriptions in American and IPA Traditions
Research Article| December 01 1998 Vowel Charts and Central Vowel Transcriptions in American and IPA Traditions Geoffrey K. Pullum; Geoffrey K. Pullum Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google William A. Ladusaw William A. Ladusaw University of California, Santa Cruz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Publication of the American Dialect Society (1998) 80 (1): 5–33. https://doi.org/10.1215/-80-1-5 Cite Icon…
The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax
The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax (PPFS) is a proposed universal principle of grammar that prohibits reference to phonological information in syntactic rules or constraints. Although many linguists have noted phenomena that appear to them to be in conflict with it, the appearances are misleading in all cases we have examined. This paper scrutinizes four instructive cases in French that appear to falsify the PPFS. Section 1 deals with the all…
The Morpholexical Nature of English to-Contraction
The forms represented orthographically as 〈wanna〉, 〈hafta〉, 〈gonna〉, 〈gotta〉, 〈oughta〉, 〈usta〉, and 〈sposta〉 have standardly been analyzed as involving a syntactic rule or cliticization operation called to -contraction. Occasionally it has been suggested that the forms in question have been iexicalized', i.e., WANNA and HAFTA are synchronically distinct lexemes from WANT and HAVE. I argue here that neither approach is correct. The syntactic accou…
Learnability, Hyperlearning, and the Poverty of the Stimulus
Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Role of Learnability in Grammatical Theory (1996)
Cliticization vs. Inflection
Two types of bound morphemes—clitics and inflectional affixes—are found attached to (free) words in many languages. At least six lines of evidence separate the clear cases on each side: the degree of selection between the dependent morpheme and the word to which it is attached; arbitrary lexical gaps; phonological idiosyncrasies; semantic idiosyncrasies; syntactic operations affecting the combinations; and restrictions on the combinability of cli…
The Duke of York gambit
A Duke who has not been satisfactorily identified with any historical figure is lampooned in a traditional rhyme (believed to have been directed originally at the King of France) as follows: The Grand Old Duke of York He had ten thousand men He marched them up a great high hill And he marched them down again . The implication is that this was incompetent and self-defeating activity on his part. Linguists very frequently seem to give evidence of a…
Autonomous Syntax and the Analysis of Auxiliaries
Historically, the analysis of the English auxiliary given by Chomsky 1957 has been associated mainly with the autonomous-syntax (‘interpretive semantics’) position, while the analysis of auxiliaries as main verbs first proposed by Ross 1969 has been aligned with ‘generative semantics'. This correlation is an accidental one. If less commonly discussed members of the class of auxiliary verbs are taken into account, it is possible to adduce overwhel…
Object-Initial Languages
Auxiliaries and Related Phenomena in a Restrictive Theory of Grammar
This paper presents a description of an interestingly rich subset of English in terms of Generalized Phrase-Structure Grammar, and compares this description with some other recent treatments. The domain covered includes the auxiliary-verb system together with a number of subsystems that crucially interact with the analysis of auxiliaries: Do so Ellipsis, VP Fronting, VP Negation, VP ‘Deletion’, Sentential Adverb Placement, and ‘Subject-Auxiliary …
Phonological Resolution of Syntactic Feature Conflict
Agreement and government can give rise to syntactic feature conflicts; e.g., a verb may have to agree in gender with a coördinate NP composed of NP's of differing genders. The resolution of such conflicts is to some extent determined by general semantic or syntactic principles (‘principled resolution‘). In addition, the existence of a governed or agreeing form that is neutral with respect to the features in question always permits a conflict to b…
Phonetic Symbol Guide
The *Phonetic Symbol Guide* provides a comprehensive overview of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), offering detailed descriptions and guidance on the use of phonetic symbols. It covers the full range of sounds represented in the IPA chart, including consonants, vowels, suprasegmentals, and diacritics. Each symbol entry includes articulatory descriptions, examples from various languages, and common usage notes. The guide also addresses is…
The distribution and category status of adjectives and adverbs
It has long been argued that the environments in which adjectives and adverbs occur are mutually exclusive. This claim is based on a superficial observation that adjectives modify nouns, while adverbs modify other categories. In this paper, we argue that there are a substantial number of environments in English where complementarity, thus defined, does not hold. One interesting such environment is the function of modifier of nouns, and in one sec…
Anaphoric one and its implications
The nominal anaphoric element one has figured prominently in discussions of linguistic nativism because of an important argument advanced by C. L. Baker (1978). His argument has been frequently cited within the cognitive and linguistic sciences, and has provided the topic for a chain of experimental and computational psycholinguistics papers. Baker's crucial grammaticality facts, though much repeated in the literature, have not been critically in…
The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax
The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax (PPFS) is a proposed universal principle of grammar that prohibits reference to phonological information in syntactic rules or constraints. Although many linguists have noted phenomena that appear to them to be in conflict with it, the appearances are misleading in all cases we have examined. This paper scrutinizes four instructive cases in French that appear to falsify the PPFS. Section 1 deals with the all…
The Morpholexical Nature of English to-Contraction
The forms represented orthographically as 〈wanna〉, 〈hafta〉, 〈gonna〉, 〈gotta〉, 〈oughta〉, 〈usta〉, and 〈sposta〉 have standardly been analyzed as involving a syntactic rule or cliticization operation called to -contraction. Occasionally it has been suggested that the forms in question have been iexicalized', i.e., WANNA and HAFTA are synchronically distinct lexemes from WANT and HAVE. I argue here that neither approach is correct. The syntactic accou…
Twentieth Century Conceptions of Language
The X-bar theory of phrase structure
X-bar theory is widely regarded as a substantive theory of phrase structure properties in natural languages. In this paper we will demonstrate that a formalization of its content reveals very little substance in its claims. We state and discuss six conditions that encapsulate the claims of X-bar theory: L EXICALITY -each nonterminal is a projection of a preterminal; S UCCESSION -each X n + 1 dominates an X n for all n ≥ 0; U NIFORMITY -all maxima…
Nostalgic views from Building 20
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
English nominal gerund phrases as noun phrases with verb-phrase heads
La notion de tete de syntagme en syntaxe. Analyse du syntagme gerondif nominal en anglais dans le cadre de la grammaire syntagmatique generalisee
Fear and loathing of the English passive
Short Report
In this article we consider the relationship between phonetic possibility and phonological permissibility of segment types. We ask (i) are any phonetically impossible segments phonologically permissible? and (ii) are any phonetically possible segments phonologically impermissible? Our main focus is on answering (ii). We analyze the implications of the only relevant case we can find, which is in Cohn's (1990, 1993a) examination of nasality spreadi…
Theorizing about the Syntax of Human Language
Linguists standardly assume that a grammar is a formal system that 'generates' a set of derivations. But this is not the only way to formalize grammars. I sketch a different basis for syntactic theory: model-theoretic syntax (MTS). It defines grammars as finite sets of statements that are true (or false) in certain kinds of structure (finite labeled graphs such as trees). Such statements provide a direct description of syntactic structure. Genera…
Tracking the origins of transformational generative grammar
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Deleting named morphemes
Languages with object before subject
Sequential and simultaneous rule application in Spanish phonology
Lessons from the English auxiliary system
The English auxiliary system exhibits many lexical exceptions and subregularities, and considerable dialectal variation, all of which are frequently omitted from generative analyses and discussions. This paper presents a detailed, movement-free account of the English Auxiliary System within Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2010, Michaelis 2011, Boas & Sag 2012) that utilizes techniques of lexicalist and construction-based analysis. The result…
Fusion of functions
In this paper we present a detailed new analysis of the English expressions once , twice and thrice . These, we claim, are primarily compound determinatives, analogous in many respects to expressions like someone and somewhere . The new analysis exploits the framework of the Cambridge grammar of the English language (2002) in which the morphological nature of the compound determinative category reflects a fusion of functions, typically determiner…
Remarks on the 1989 revision of the International Phonetic Alphabet
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Yokuts Bibliography
Lowth's Grammar
The Duke of York gambit
A Duke who has not been satisfactorily identified with any historical figure is lampooned in a traditional rhyme (believed to have been directed originally at the King of France) as follows: The Grand Old Duke of York He had ten thousand men He marched them up a great high hill And he marched them down again . The implication is that this was incompetent and self-defeating activity on his part. Linguists very frequently seem to give evidence of a…
Sequential and simultaneous rule application in Spanish phonology
Autonomous Syntax and the Analysis of Auxiliaries
Historically, the analysis of the English auxiliary given by Chomsky 1957 has been associated mainly with the autonomous-syntax (‘interpretive semantics’) position, while the analysis of auxiliaries as main verbs first proposed by Ross 1969 has been aligned with ‘generative semantics'. This correlation is an accidental one. If less commonly discussed members of the class of auxiliary verbs are taken into account, it is possible to adduce overwhel…
Assessing Linguistic Arguments
A Bibliography of Contemporary Linguistic Research
A Select Bibliography of Guiana Carib Languages
Object-Initial Languages
Languages with object before subject
The Nature of Syntactic Representation
The Phrase Phonology of English and French
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics. Thesis. 1972. Ph.D
Letter
Auxiliaries and Related Phenomena in a Restrictive Theory of Grammar
This paper presents a description of an interestingly rich subset of English in terms of Generalized Phrase-Structure Grammar, and compares this description with some other recent treatments. The domain covered includes the auxiliary-verb system together with a number of subsystems that crucially interact with the analysis of auxiliaries: Do so Ellipsis, VP Fronting, VP Negation, VP ‘Deletion’, Sentential Adverb Placement, and ‘Subject-Auxiliary …
The order of constituents in modern Greek
Order, Concord, and Constituency
Topic … comment
Topic… Comment
Phonology in syntax
Cliticization vs. Inflection
Two types of bound morphemes—clitics and inflectional affixes—are found attached to (free) words in many languages. At least six lines of evidence separate the clear cases on each side: the degree of selection between the dependent morpheme and the word to which it is attached; arbitrary lexical gaps; phonological idiosyncrasies; semantic idiosyncrasies; syntactic operations affecting the combinations; and restrictions on the combinability of cli…
Deleting named morphemes
Topic… comment
Topic … comment
Topic … comment
Topic… comment
Linguistics (66 obras) · Philosophy (64 obras) · Computer Science (41 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (33 obras) · Epistemology (22 obras) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (21 obras) · History (18 obras) · Philosophy of language (17 obras) · Psychology (17 obras) · Metaphysics (16 obras)