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10 Results, If Any The previous nine chapters of this work are too long and complex and deal with too many issues and assumptions to permit any reasonably complete summary of what may have been achieved. Su‰ce it to say that I have sought both to outline a general theoretic framework in which an NL grammar is a nongenerative, model-theoretic system and to support a conception of syntactic structure entirely dependent on primitive edges, edge labeling, and primitive nonstructural relations between edges, concepts foreign to other current approaches to NL syntax. Internal to these general assumptions defining one kind of abstract grammatical framework, the discussion has focused on properties of English objects. The central claim has been the documentable diversity of objects, yielding a typology of at least three distinct types that I have called 2 objects, 3 objects, and 4 objects. I have argued in multiple ways that this distinction is central to understanding many aspects of the syntactic behavior of English objects, including periphrastic passives, pseudopassives, nominalization, middle formation, expletive there constructions , ditransitive clause behavior, Visser’s Generalization, and much more. At key points, I have tried to indicate how the basic ideas apply insightfully as well to puzzling issues in the syntax of other NLs— in particular, French, German, and Spanish. Perhaps the most notable feature of this study is that it has sought to go beyond merely describing an abstract grammatical framework to actually constructing numerous genuinely plausible elements of the grammar of English with significant descriptive scope. The multitude of descriptive conditions, some of which may be universals, o¤er an integrated attempt to characterize a substantial (if limited) portion of English syntax, covering a variety of domains that, to my knowledge, have for the most part received no precise treatments. All aspects of the account depend entirely on the theoretical framework; thus, to the extent they are valid, they must inevitably support the more general views that define it. A noteworthy property of the descriptions o¤ered is their appeal to the notion quace, which provides a mechanism for subdividing the grammatical types speci- fied by nominal relations into more refined subtypes with key relations to the major types. Overall, this study could from one perspective be viewed as a challenge to forms of syntactic description that do not recognize primitive edges or relations between them, specifically, Barrel A ideas. While such variants have been intensively pursued for more than half a century by hundreds of researchers, particularly in their transformational instantiations, I suggest that with respect to no area addressed in the previous nine chapters has such work provided an account that compares favorably with what is o¤ered there. But I am certainly not objective on that score. A last remark. Let us suppose that the descriptive and theoretical claims embodied in earlier chapters are largely wrong and misguided. Even so, there would still be some minimal benefit to be derived from this work beyond whatever correct factual documentation it might contain . Right or wrong, the essential independence of the present account from dominant current ideas, particularly those of Barrel A, inevitably yields the following lesson. Nothing about currently popular approaches to NL syntax has been shown to be either necessary or inevitable. Whatever one’s view of the framework illustrated here, then, it should not fail to clarify the possibility of approaches to syntax deeply distinct from those that have largely defined the field since the mid-1950s. 390 Chapter 10 ...

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