Back to zero
Grammars of English often posit confusing and contradictory analyses of seemingly simple constructions like the following:
(1) I like those books/I like those.
(2) the rich, the French, the Dutch
(3) I liked what I saw.
In (i) the word those is analysed either as belonging to a single word class (typically ‘pronoun’), or to different word classes (‘determinative’ and ‘pronoun’). In (ii) words like poor, French and Dutch are classed as adjectives or as nouns, or perhaps as (partially) converted nouns. In (iii) the italicised string is often analysed as a clause (a ‘free relative clause’ or ‘nominal relative clause’) or as a noun phrase, or as both.
In my talk I will discuss a number of approaches to these syntactic puzzles. In particular, I will look at the treatment offered in Huddleston and Pullum’s Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL). To deal with these structures, CGEL posits the existence of a number of ‘fused constructions’, such that in (i) in both cases the word those belongs to the word class of determinative, which functions as a determiner when a noun follows, or as a ‘fused determiner-head’ when it occurs on its own. In the second example the underlined words are adjectives which function as ‘fused modifier-heads’ inside noun phrases, and in the third example the italicised string is a noun phrase which instantiates a ‘fused relative construction’.
I will signal a number of problems for the account in CGEL which will lead me to challenge the idea that we need to appeal to the notion of ‘fusion’ to analyse these constructions syntactically. Specifically, I will argue that introducing the notion of syntactic fusion into the grammar poses conceptual problems, and comes at a ‘cost’, because a new notion of fusion needs to be added to the store of grammatical terminology. I will contend that we can analyse these constructions by returning to the simpler analysis of positing zero heads instead.
Reference
Huddleston, R. and G.K. Pullum (2002) The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Datum und Uhrzeit: 13.5.2026, 17.00h - 18.30h
Ort: SR 33.3.211 (Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Merangasse 70, 8010 Graz)
Teilnahme auch über Zoom möglich: https://uni-graz.zoom.us/j/63576716067?pwd=dFbawaUO0aZe4tZyrc6emXb2beEvVc.1