The Identity of Noun Phrases

Lauri Karttunen

Expert InsightsPublished 1967

A discussion of the difficulties that arise in dealing with noun phrases according to the theory of transformational grammar. Why do people distinguish without difficulty between meanings of sentences that theory finds ambiguous? Although it is incompatible with the notion of deep structure as defined by Chomsky, there must be a semantic interpretation before the syntactic rules can operate. Very little has been written about the problem of reference in transformational grammars — it is assumed that all noun phrases refer to the real extralinguistic world. To explain the facts, we should restore some of the traditional grammatical machinery and admit that some pronouns and adjectives refer to other nodes that reside either in the same sentence or in the past discourse. (Prepared for presentation at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Chicago, December 28, 1967.)

Document Details

  • Copyright: RAND Corporation
  • Availability: Web Only
  • Year: 1967
  • Pages: 21
  • Document Number: P-3756

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Karttunen, Lauri, The Identity of Noun Phrases. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1967. https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3756.html.
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