- I am indebted to Fred. W. Householder, Jr., for his criticism of the first draft of this rejoinder (implying no endorsement of the present draft, of course), and for other suggestions acknowledged below.
- Roger Brown in Language XXXV (1959), p. 718.
- I put this down not to be quarrelsome but as an instance of what can happen when even the best of analyses tries to carry its procedures too far. In his Syntactic Structures Chomsky proposes that we can account for the falling intonation of interrogative-word questions on the basis of a sequence of two transformations, Tq and Twl. The effect of the first is “in part to convert the intonation from one of these to the other [i.e., to reverse the terminal fall and terminal rise],” and since the second has the same effect, and in the transformational history is applied after the first, there is a double reversal, with the result that the intonation of interrogative-word questions is like that of declaratives. The proposal takes no account of the many interrogative-word questions (e.g., all the reclamatories) and yes-no questions (all the assertives with rising intonation) in which the opposite of what is assumed is true. Chomsky's error stands as a curious example of how two different interpretations of the same bit of grammatical imagery can lead to opposite conclusions. He and Jespersen both picture questions as “doing something to” statements, and both conceive of certain questions as being “added to” other questions (for Jespersen, Modern English Grammar IV, §18.7 [2]; this gives a “question raised to the second power”). But where Chomsky's train of thought runs something like this, “What a question does to a statement is reverse its direction—therefore, another added question would reverse it again and give a lowered pitch,” Jespersen's train runs like this, “What a question does to a statement is raise its pitch—therefore, another added question would raise it some more and give an extra-high pitch.” Chomsky goes off on the tangent of interrogative-word questions. Jespersen goes off on the tangent of echo questions. Both are right, and both are wrong.
- Word XVI (1960), 119–125.
- “Boas' View of Grammatical Meaning,” American Anthropologist LXI (1959), Part 2, pp. 139–145.
- The one place where prosody makes a striking difference is in the type I don't want to go anywhere, with rise-fall-rise pitch accent on the last word, meaning ‘I don't want to go just anywhere’. But even this is not totally unambiguous, and the rise-fall-rise is not required; cf. the announcement by President Truman on Feb. 20, 1952: “I have made no commitments to England to send American troops anywhere in the world,” with two almost contradictory meanings and no necessary difference in the melody.
- See F. W. Bradley, “A Word List from South Carolina,” Publications of the American Dialect Society No. 14 (1950), p. 44.
- Note the conducive vs. non-conducive separation here as with some-any: Aren't they here already? is commutable with They're here already, aren't they? Aren't they here yeti is commutable with Are they still not here?
- Many seems to have a somewhat stronger affinity to negation and indefiniteness than does any. I find it easier to say If many of them are easy, I'll eat my hat than to say If many of them are easy, I'll be glad; but any comes as readily to one as to the other. Similarly with the more indefinite whenever and the more definite every time: Whenever there are many complaints, they appeal to me vs. *Every time there are many complaints, they appeal to me. Again, any does well in both contexts. 3—w.
- I disregard the surviving fragment ever since: I've agreed with them ever since.
- I disregard in the table the limited distribution of forms where there is no contrast. For example, in the a little row, I make no occupy the whole negative slot although it is adjunct only. Also, I add the and-or-nor row to complete the picture, though or and nor alternate in exceptional ways.
- The kinship of conditions and questions is of course well known. Compare Had he seen anyone? and Had he seen anyone he would have told us.
- Jespersen states “nothing hinders us from logically inverting the order (succeed=not fail [rather than fail=not succeed]). These words, therefore, cannot properly be classed with such formally negative words as unhappy, etc.” Negation (Copenhagen, 1917), p. 43.
- The choice of any to determine the negativeness of something else is indeed sometimes practical, as in the case of if not and unless: If you don't say anything (something) I'll scream vs. Unless you say something I'll scream. Or few and a few: Few need any vs. A few need some.
- It is curious that Lees overlooks the possibility of an embedded negative in the logician's “nothing” rather than “not anything” form. I forced her not to do anything is really a second, unambiguous, transformation, based on I forced her to do nothing, which is still ambiguous: You forced her to sell her insurance.—I forced her to do nothing!vs. I forced her to do nothing—just sit all day and relax. Householder comments: “The proper derivation of I don't want him to eat anything is surely from (a) I want + Complement him, and (b) He eats nothing, plus the familiar transformation of X+CΛ
- Willard Van Orman Quine, Elementary Logic (Boston, 1941), p. 100.
- Ibid., p. 99.
- Ibid., p. 13.
- Essentials of English Grammar (London, 1933), §17.91. Is it amiss to wonder why Lees did not consult the handbooks? Jespersen's “He did not like some of his wife's friends (=he disliked some of them), He did not like any of his wife's friends (=he disliked all of them),” p. 182, would have been a useful caution, as would Kruisinga's three pages of examples, Handbook of Present-Day English (Groningen, 1932), §1336. It is also worth noting that in his monograph on negation, Jespersen nowhere formalized the some-any contrast.
- Morris Halle in Language XXXVI (1960), 113–114.
- I reserve this final footnote for comments on more peripheral aspects of the review.
- The opening salvo, that I try “to characterize by distillation of essence the ‘basic meaning’ of all Q's and then study all formal devices thought to signal that meaning” is incorrect. I was at pains to do exactly the opposite—to point out that I did not believe that the mass of utterances reacted to as questions are amenable to a single formulation. I permitted myself to guess at reasons for the remarkably uniform reactions that speakers show in grouping diverse types under a single label, but I avowedly did this as an amateur psychologist and dropped the disguise after a paragraph or two of speculation. My purpose was not to find what the question is, but to find what questions are—what types, A. B. C…, can be identified that show internal consistency and a high degree of stereotyping, to trace, for example, the fundamental sameness of Sick? and Done anything? It would have been more to the point had the review taken just one of these classes—say ellip or complementary—and inquired into its validity instead of dismissing the lot as a collection of “awkward taxonomic labels.” It might have proved really fruitful to take the classes aux and ellip, assuming them to be established, and to formulate a set of rules for deriving the second from the first. For example, Householder obliges me with the following: “Three transformations are sufficient to account for all Bolinger's principal types (excluding pyramid Q's, which can all be derived by compounding transformations).
- T1: This transformation will yield (from ordinary kernel sentences) B's Tagsert, Ellip, Tagellip, Vike, Servike, Tagservike as well as a non-Q form John's coming, he is! It must be followed, of course, by the transformation which converts the repeated NPk to he, she, it, we, you, or they.
- T2: Chomsky's Tq (No. 18, p. 112 in Syntactic Structures) with modification to include both types of tags arising from T1, will yield Aux, Tagaux, and Tagvike.
- T3: This transformation will yield Frag, Tagfrag, and Potential. The above three transformations can probably be simplified, and perhaps reduced to two.”
- Some of the strictures are difficult to reconcile with a thorough reading of the monograph. The opening pages seem to have been studied carefully, and inferences drawn from them that are not warranted on the basis of the later discussion. For example: “And to begin with, it would be best not to become disconcerted by the fact that what is here discriminated as a Q may be used by the speaker for some purpose other than ‘asking’, as in Won't you have a seat?” In the first chapter I give instances of such utterances not punctuated in their sources with a question mark, by way of showing that some speakers do not regard them as questions. But later I class them as aux questions, not having been disconcerted so far as I am aware. Again, “it is inappropriate for the scientist to attempt to ‘define’ the objects of his study.” This assigns a meaning to define which was not my intention nor my practise in the body of the work. It is appropriate for the scientist to define—delimit—the objects of his study. What besides this is the taxonomy of the natural sciences? (See Robert E. Longacre's defense of namelabeling, in Language XXXVI (1960), 88.) An insect has six legs and a three-part body. This was found by collecting and comparing, and it is the definition that was arrived at, as I hoped to arrive at definitions when I announced that my intention was “to isolate types that can be linguistically defined.” You can do this scientifically for vike questions and for insects; you can't do it scientifically for “the question” and for “bugs.”
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