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On Subject-Auxiliary Inversion and the notion “purely formal generalization”
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Robert D. Borsley
Published/Copyright:
February 10, 2009
Abstract
English Subject-Auxiliary Inversion (SAI, hereafter) has been considered by many linguists to be a prime example of a formal generalization that does not allow a characterization in functional or semantic terms. However, Adele Goldberg's target article argues that the internal syntactic form of SAI can indeed by characterized in such terms. We provide a considerable amount of evidence that Goldberg is unsuccessful in her attempt to mount a counter-challenge to the idea that SAI represents a significant purely formal generalization in the grammar of English.
Keywords:: auxiliary; construction; formal generalization; polarity; prototype; subject; Subject-Auxiliary Inversion
Received: 2007-07-08
Revised: 2008-01-14
Published Online: 2009-02-10
Published in Print: 2009-February
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Keywords for this article
auxiliary;
construction;
formal generalization;
polarity;
prototype;
subject;
Subject-Auxiliary Inversion
Articles in the same Issue
- Cognitive Linguistics comes of age
- ‘Caused motion’? The semantics of the English to-dative and the Dutch aan-dative
- Fictive dynamicity, nominal aspect, and the Finnish copulative construction
- The role of gesture in crossmodal typological studies
- The nature of generalization in language
- Constructions at work or at rest?
- On Subject-Auxiliary Inversion and the notion “purely formal generalization”
- The case of the missing generalizations
- Constructions and generalizations
- Cognitive (Construction) Grammar
- Constructions on holiday
- Developing constructions
- Constructions work
