Méthodes en syntaxe: régime des constructions complétives By Maurice Gross (review)

REVIEWS695 Klausenberger, J. 1975. Latin vocalic quantity to quality: a pseudo-problem? Diachronic studies in Romance linguistics, ed. by M. Saltarelli & D. Wanner, 107-17. The Hague: Mouton. Ladefoged, P. 1971. Preliminaries to linguistic phonetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lausberg, H. 1963. Romanische Sprachwissenschaft, I: Einleitung und Vokalismus. 2d ed. Berlin: de Gruyter. Meyer-Lübke, W. 1935. Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. 3d ed. Heidelberg: Winter. Rosoff, G. H. 1974. The phonetic framework of the universal sound correlates in Romance vowel diachrony. Linguistics 135.57-71. Schultz-Gora, 0. 1915. Altprovenzalisches Elementarbuch. 3d ed. Heidelberg: Winter. Spence, N. C. W. 1965. Quantity and quality in the vowel-system of Vulgar Latin. Word 21.1-18. Walker, D. C. 1975. Competing analyses of the Vulgar Latin vowel system. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 20.1-22. [Received 25 June 1977.] Méthodes en syntaxe: régime des constructions complétives. By Maurice Gross. Paris: Hermann, 1975. Pp. 414. Reviewed by Colette Dubuisson, Université du Québec à Montréal This work has two parts. It contains, first, a criticism and evaluation of linguistic theories, especially of the methodological and conceptual foundations of transformational grammar. The rest is a detailed study of 3000 French verbs with respect to 100 syntactic properties. These verbs accept an object clause and an infinitive: (1) a. Paul tient à ce qu ellefasse ceci 'Paul insists that she do this.' b. Paul tient à faire cela. 'Paul insists on doing that.' Gross classifies these in several groups, and indicates their behavior in tables with binary features. In order to understand this work, it is important that we first explain G's position. Although many of his ideas stem from Zellig Harris, he does not consider himself a follower of Harris. G acknowledges no formal school. However, from his introduction and the following chapters, we could probably connect him in some ways to the positivist school of thought. The purpose of this review is not to rehash the positivist-determinist debate (on that subject, see Karl Popper's The logic ofscientific discovery). But it is important to relate G's work to a particular school of thought—because, for positivists, science does not rely on a system of concepts but rather on a system of facts. The result is G's emphasis on the taxonomic process and his constant rejection of all theories, formalizations, and models. Certain weaknesses of transformational grammar, to which G alludes, are common knowledge—e.g. the fact that generative grammars are much too powerful and that their expressive power must be restricted. G also rejects Chomsky's notion of 'the creative aspect of language use', since for him the notion of creativity could just as well take place in the framework of a finite corpus of utterances. He attaches 696LANGUAGE, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3 (1978) no special importance to the fact that speakers can produce and comprehend an unlimited number of new sentences, while this observation is basic in Chomsky's theory. Chomsky's main purpose is to construct a grammar of a language with an evaluation procedure , where a grammar is a theory of language which defines the concept of grammatical sentence. But G does not develop a grammar as a theory of language. He simply does not believe in theories. He wishes to start from a limited corpus of data, and to avoid all sorts of formalization and abstractness. Like Harris, G also rejects the use of trees in his work ; rather, he adopts Tesnière's view on the segmentation of the sentence. For him, there is no serious reason to establish that a verb phrase exists (but many transformationalists would agree with that). For G, whose definition of a phrase is based on the distributional study of sentences, even the notion of noun phrase is problematic. Transformations are represented by strings of lowest-level grammatical symbols. He does not introduce a distinction between N and NP in transformational statements because he considers the status of NP to be doubtful. For example, the NP aucun défaut cannot be moved by extraction in a sentence like this: (2)Paul n'a vu aucun défaut ' Paul did not see any defect.' (3)a. *C...