PDF #179 – Clitics and Constituents in Phrase Structure Grammar
In this study, I address a set of problems on the status of Phrase Structure Grammar and its importance to the syntax-morphology and the syntax-phonology interfaces. The point of departure of this study was the realization that the results of the classical constituency tests which have been proposed to motivate constituent structure in generative grammar, as inventoried for instance in a classical syntax textbook, pose a number of problems with respect to the classical assumptions about the constituent structure of English, and even more so, of French. In this paper the author makes an inventory of such tests and discuss their results – at a very naive level of linguistic sophistication – concentrating especially on the question of the internal syntax of the NP. This review lead to a number of somewhat surprising results. It first shows that the constituency tests can be largely divided into two groups, syntactically oriented criteria and phonologically oriented criteria. The it shows that the syntactically oriented tests largely undetermined constituent structure choices below the phrasal level, to an extent which is not usually taken into account. Furthermore, it shows that the results of the phonologically oriented tests often contradict the choices classically made for sub phrasal constituency in syntax.
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