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  • Skeptical linguistic essays by Paul M. Postal
  • Robert D. Borsley
Skeptical linguistic essays. By Paul M. Postal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. 414. ISBN 019516671X. $39.95.

Like Paul Postal’s earlier works, this is a book of considerable interest which deserves to be widely read. It has something in common with some of his earlier books, but it is a distinctive contribution to theoretical linguistics. It consists of an introduction and two parts. Part 1, entitled ‘Studies in linguistics’, contains five chapters that discuss problematic aspects of English and one chapter on the nature of natural language grammars. Part 2, entitled ‘Studies in junk linguistics’, consists of eight chapters subjecting the dominant transformational approach to syntax to critical scrutiny.

P defines a skeptical linguistic essay in the introduction as ‘one based on a deep and longstanding view that much nonetheless prestigious current linguistics has in fact made very restricted descriptive and explanatory progress and, in some areas where great things have been claimed, no real substantive progress at all’ (3). What he has in mind here is mainstream transformational grammar in its various incarnations. Illustrating, he discusses a passage from Chomsky & Lasnik 1995, which argues that providing a rule system from which some set of phenomena can be derived is not ‘a real result’ and that ‘it is often possible to devise one that will more or less work’ and goes on to suggest that ‘the task is now to show how the phenomena … can be deduced from the invariant principles of UG [universal grammar] with parameters set in one of the permissible ways’ (4). P sees in this ‘the fantastic and unsupported notion that descriptive success is not really that hard and so not of much importance’ (5). He points out that if descriptive success were really not that hard, one would expect successful descriptions to be abundant within transformational frameworks. He suggests, however, that ‘the actual descriptions in these frameworks so far are not only not successful but so bad as to hardly merit being taken seriously’ (5). This might seem like a harsh assessment, but P says a lot to justify it later, especially in Chs. 7 and 8. He concludes that ‘if there are no actual defensible descriptions, talk of deducing such from universal grammar or the like is evidently more like make-believe than serious inquiry’ (6).

P’s main aim in Part 1 is to show ‘how far one remains in the year 2003 from serious understanding of English grammar’ (6). He provides interesting and persuasive discussions of a variety of matters. In Ch. 1 he looks at length at locative-inversion sentences such as Under the table was lying an elderly crocodile. He shows that there is evidence that the preverbal PP is a subject but even more evidence that it is not a subject. He goes on to develop an analysis of such sentences within the metagraph framework (a development of the late 1970s framework, arc pair grammar (APG)) in which they have an empty expletive subject but the PP has certain subject properties.

Ch. 2 discusses examples like You can depend on him to do something decent and argues that they involve raising to prepositional complement position. In other words, the post-on DP is a [End Page 442] superficial main clause constituent but an underlying complement subject. P presents a variety of evidence for this position, which, as he notes, is in conflict with the assumptions of lexical functional grammar (LFG), head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG), and government and binding theory (GB). He suggests that there is evidence here that ‘enormous skepticism is justified with respect to current syntactic claims and conclusions’ (108).

Ch. 3 is concerned with the interaction of complex DP shift and right-node-raising with raising to object. P proposes that a DP that is raised to object position leaves behind an invisible resumptive pronoun if it subsequently undergoes complex DP shift and right-node-raising. He notes that the ‘look-ahead’ property of this proposal is problematic for derivational frameworks but not for a nonderivational approach.

In Ch. 4, P argues for the importance of a distinction between chromatic and...

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