Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of English

Introduction to Linguistics

Fall 2004

Singleton (2000), Chapter 2: Lexis and Syntax

In this chapter Singleton is trying to make a very important point about the relationship between syntax and the lexis. What he basically claims is that colligation, or the phenomenon whereby lexical items chose or create their linguistic environment, is a major driving force in any syntactic system and must be dealt with. In making his point he takes the reader through the development of several alternatives the generative grammar view of Chomsky, which, due it strict application of the concept of modularity, first rejected the idea of lexical effects in syntax. Since the 1950s and 60s when the lexicon was believed to be an unordered list of idiosyncratic elements in generative grammar several models have arisen which have sought to address the issue of colligation head on by making a major part of the overall theory. Chosmky for his own part has added elements to the model of UG which indirectly addresses the issue of colligation while retaining the basic structure of the model.

Chomsky's idea, as we talked about in class, is that UG forms the core of language and that everything else (and here what he's really talking about is the lexicon) is the periphery. From his use of terminology we can clearly see that for Chomsky the core is what is important and the periphery is what is unimportant. For Singleton it is just the opposite. It is the lexicon which has connections to all different aspects of language and as such may very well form the core of language and if there is something called UG then UG would be something like an underlying periphery regulating, as mentioned by Fillmore et al. (1988), structural changes.

The evidence Singleton offers for this view is the phenomenon of colligation or the idea that lexical items determine to a certain, and highly debated, extent the syntactic form of utterances. Colligation basically refers to connections, or syntactic partnerships, between the lexical units. As we discussed last week in class verbs have what Chomsky calls subcategorization (SUBCAT) frames in this allows them, through the projection principle, to create grammatical utterances. Thus, it should seem quite familiar to think about verbs as being intransitive, transitive and ditransitive and as are shown in the examples below. (The elements in parenthesis are optional.)

1a. The armadillo walked (quickly).

2. The porcupine stabbed the marmot (with its quills).

3. The elephant gave the girl a pinch (on the arm).

Certainly information about the complements a verb must take is necessary in a system of creating language. We can see in the case of /walk/ and if a sentence has a different structure than /walk/ must still be used accordingly.

1b. John enjoyed walking.

1c. We walked to the restaurant.

In addition to SUBCAT information which basically deals with complements or what follows the verb it has been pointed out that verbs probably also decide what kind of information can precede them.

1d. The dog walked across the room.

1e. * The pencil walked across the room.

Here 1e is not acceptable because the noun preceding the verb is not selected by the verb principally because pencils cannot walk. Thus the verb must also stipulate what kind of units can come before it. In generative grammar this is called semantic selection and the types of stipulations are called theta-roles. So this is the standard form of how colligation, Here are some more examples to illustrate using more and different information.

4 /walk/ <subject><agent>___ (intransitive)

John walked.

5. /plant/ <subject><agent>___<object><patient> (transitive)

Mary planted the roses in the garden.

So this is the standard version or how colligation works and this is where Singleton stops and colligation is like that, but is also much more specific. In colligation what we're talking about is not merely the selection of a category set but of particular lexical items from or by other proceeding and following lexical items and this varies freely because lexical items are ambiguous. Because lexical items have many different meanings and each of these meanings might actually call for a different type of structure we can see that colligation creates much larger problems for standard theories of language which try to give the lexicon and language in general a more fixed structure. This is especially true when we recognize that new uses for pre-existing lexical units are created freely. Here are just a few examples to illustrate.

4a. John walked his dog (in the park).

4b. John walked Bob into his office (with a smile).

4c. John walked Bob into the gas chamber (with extreme force).

In 4a we have /walk/ functioning as a transitive verb and the ,meaning of /walk/ has been altered slightly. In 4b we have /walk/ as a ditransitive verb and with a different meaning than those present in 4 and 4a. Finally, /walk/ 4c is also a ditransitive verb but the meaning is different from that in 4b because of the specific noun used; gas chamber.

5a. John planted his feet wide apart.

5b. * John planted his feet.

5c. John planted a kiss on the armadillo`s hairless head.

In 5a and 5c we see that the verb /plant/ when followed by the complement his feet functions as a ditransitive verb. This would seem to be a very common usage of the verb /plant/ yet it is a phenomenon that is not dealt with by either Chomsky or any of the other researchers or theories mentioned in the chapter by Singleton, although the work of Halliday comes close.

Still, we can take this basic phenomenon even further with a few more examples of simple meaning change.

6a. Jill stroked the cat (with her hand).

6b. Jill stroked the water (with her butt).

7a. John was pinned down by Mary.

7b. John was pinned down by gunfire.

8a. William opened the door.

8b. The key opened the door.

In each of the three pairs of sentences presented above in 6-8 we find meaning changes on the verb caused by the following noun and modifier (in the case of 6b). Thus, what we can tern colligational effects seem to be a highly prevalent phenomenon in language which must be dealt with in a more concrete manner than has been attempted by the models introduced by Singleton. One hopeful approach is the one started by Fillmore et al. (1988) in what has become called construction grammar.