Masked Inversion In French

Postal, Paul M

ISBN 10: 0226675696 / ISBN 13: 9780226675695

Published by University Of Chicago Press, 1989

About this Item

Cloth, dj, F/F. x+156pp, index, a nice fine copy. New. Detailed study of Masked Inversion - a puzzling syntactic anomaly. Until the publication of Postal's book it had resisted proper explanation. 500 grams.

Seller Inventory # 20692

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Masked Inversion In French
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226675696
• ISBN 13: 9780226675695
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st edition.
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Weight: 500 grams

About this title

Synopsis

In this important work of linguistic analysis, Paul M. Postal addresses a paradigm anomaly in French that has hitherto resisted explanation. A general restriction limiting the form of direct objects in complex infinitival constructions with main verbs like faire fails to hold with certain subordinate verbs, especially connaître. Marshaling extensive evidence, Postal argues that this apparent irregularity is a symptom of a deeper regularity. Rather than being an ordinary transitive complement, the subordinate clause in these cases is actually an Inversion structure, one in which the logical subject demotes to indirect object. However, since this demotion induces no word order change or other direct morphological consequences, the inversion is "masked," and revealed only by several types of apparent anomalies.

This analysis has significant consequences for contemporary syntactic theories. First, the arguments support the view that a sentence's superficial structure cannot be identified with its syntactic structure, even though such an identification is a fundamental assumption of several currently influential grammatical frameworks. Second, even certain theories that do posit abstract aspects of grammatical form fail to allow for the needed Inversion structures. Postal's study supports theories based on the notion of arc and stratification into levels which provide a natural treatment consistent with the factual requirements.

Masked Inversion in French is the first systematic account of this puzzling French syntactic anomaly, and its findings will stimulate research in many areas of natural language grammatical structure.

About the Author

Paul M. Postal is a member of the research staff at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center. He is the author of ten previous books including Constituent Structure, Cross-over Phenomena, On Raising, Arc Pair Grammar, and The Vastness of Natural Languages.