词汇-语法五十年

章节摘录

　　Consequences of the Metalanguage being Included in the Language　　Maurice Gross　　On several occasions， Z.S. Hams stated that the metalanguage of grammar was part of the lan-guage. At first sight， this statement is disturbing， but when understood in respect to Hams's practice of grammar construction， it has far-reaching consequences. In principle， the metalanguage of a sci-entific field is made of concepts and of statements involving these concepts： the laws of the field. In quantum physics for example， concepts are elementary particles， Planck's constant， etc.， and state-ments are Heisenberg's uncertainty relations， etc. In syntax the concepts are essentially the gram-matical categories of words （i.e. the parts of speech）， and statements are the rules that assemble the words and/or categories into higher units such as phrases and sentences. Modern structural lin-guists， such as Leonard Bloomfield， set out to formalize the metalanguage， and this activity has be-come the main trend， whether in generative syntax or in the various logical systems that aim at re-presenting meaning. Meanwhile， the corresponding descriptive work has all but disappeared， at least for languages such as English that should be the main empirical background for theories. Formali-zation results in a set of abstract symbols and well-defined formal rules， which， in an obvious way，have not much to do with the units of natural language.　　Inclusion of the metalanguage in the language can be seen as a methodological principle or as an empirical discovery. We will discuss various aspects of this statement by presenting different ex-amples. We are convinced that the principle has deep consequences for linguistics， but that it may take time and research efforts to measure its full impact.　　For Hams， grammar is the formalized description of a given language， say English.　　As in any scientific activity， the metalanguage is constructed by the specialists of the field who agree on an object to describe， that is， on facts to be accounted for. Then abstract entities are de-fined and refined in order to improve the understanding of facts. Consensus among specialists is reached through experiments， but facts and experiments must be reproducible. It goes without saying that research programmes should be common to the linguistic community，whether involved in parti-cular language descriptions or m comparing and abstracting descriptions across languages.　　Elements of the metalanguage of grammar have been deeply engrained by education amongpeople. Examples are：　　——The categories of words such as verb， n，oun， adjective， preposition.affixes， more abstract units are the phrases： noun phrases， verb phrases， etc. and gram，matical functions，such　as subject or object.　　——The rules of grammar， such as agreement rules， pronominalization rules， etc.　　All of these concepts have been refined into subcategories according to descriptive needs and ac-cording to the main application of grammar， which is the teaching of first and second languages.　　Most of these concepts are part of a cultural heritage， dating at least to Greek and Roman civi-lization. Until recently， they have been thought to be universal and have been exported as such by Christian missionaries who used them to describe the languages of Africa， America， Asia， and Oceania. Although specialists have often argued that the Creco-Roman categories are irrelevant to most of these exotic languages， the educational systems of most colonized countries are stuck with this grammatical framework which has been transmitted from generation to generation with remarka-ble stability.　　In fact， the relevance of the Greek-Roman metalanguage even to European languages is far from obvious， but has almost never been questioned. Categories of words have been demonstrated to be useful， for example in the formulation of agreement rules. Confirmation of their value and gener-ality dates back only the nineteenth century， when dictionaries with substantial coverage of the words of a language were built and categories assigned to each word.　　……

书籍目录

序
前言
Remarks on the Separation between Syntax and Semantics
Remarks on the Principles and the Goals of the Syntactic Tables of
Lexical Elements
Taxonomy in Syntax
The Use of Finite Automata in the Lexical Representation of Natural
Language
Dictionary Completeness and Corpus Analysis
The Argument Structure of Elementary Sentences
Local Gramma and their Representation by Finite Automata
Cotructing Lexicon-Gramma
Paing with the Lexicon Grammar, Harrisian Traformatio and Local
Subgramma
Representation of Finite Utterances and the Automatic Paing of
Texts
On Counting Meaningful Units in Texts
The Cotruction of Local Gramma
Some Remarks on the Application of a Lexicon-Grammar
Coequences of the Metalanguage being Included in the Language
Organization of the Lexicon-Grammar of French Verbs
Lexicon—Grammar，Electronic Dictionaries and Local Gramma of Italian
A Linguistic Test Battery for Suppon Verb Cotructio
Using Lexicon—Grammar Tables for French Verbs in a Large—coverage
Paer
Neutral Phrasal Verbs in English
Is the Lexicon—Grammar Exploitable for Language Processing？
附录一 《莫里斯·格罗斯生平》(节录)
附录二 《词汇一语法》简介
附录三 《生成语法的失败》(节录)
 2010年国际上评价乔姆斯基语法的两份资料

作者简介

本论文集精选了发表在国外期刊上的20篇有关“词汇—语法”的论文，以面向语言工业为主导，所选的文章，从整体上能反映出“词汇—语法”的历史轨迹，因其经典性、全面性、平衡性和接受性而具有极高的适读性。这是一本介绍并不依附于美国所谓“主流”语言学的学派的论文集，适合从事汉语研究、语言教学、词典编纂、翻译软件的研究者阅读。

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