A Reconsideration of Dative Movements or, Beating a Dead Horse Back to Life.

Ray Jackendoff, Peter W. Culicover

Expert InsightsPublished 1970

A contribution to transformational grammar, explaining the indirect object shifts involved in passive versus active sentences. Noting that the preposition next to the verb is always deleted, a number of object-permuting rules are generalized into one rule of prepositional phrase movement and two rules of preposition deletion. The remaining problems of acceptability can be understood in terms of the hearer's difficulty in interpreting the resulting word strings. Contrary to the hypothesis that he reconstructs the deep structure by doing the transformations backward, it is hypothesized that the hearer first establishes known noun phrase positions, then fits NPs that have been moved into the gaps. Difficulty in finding the gap where the phrase was removed makes a sentence unacceptable. This explanation in terms of perceptual strategy accounts for the fact that three independent rules have identical restrictions. (Prepared for [Foundations of Language].) 28 pp. Bibliog.

Document Details

  • Copyright: RAND Corporation
  • Availability: Web Only
  • Year: 1970
  • Pages: 28
  • Document Number: P-4501

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Jackendoff, Ray and Peter W. Culicover, A Reconsideration of Dative Movements or, Beating a Dead Horse Back to Life. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1970. https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4501.html.
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