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The selection of papers reprinted here traces the development of
syntax from structural linguistics through transformational
linguistics to operator gram mar. These three are not opposing
views or independent assumptions about language. Rather, they are
successive stages of investigation into the word combinations which
constitue the sentences of a language in contrast to those which do
not. Throughout, the goal has been to find the systemati cities of
these combinations, and then to obtain each sentence in a uniform
way from its parts. In structural analysis, the parts were words
(simple or complex, belonging to particular classes) or particular
sequences of these. In transformational analysis, it is found that
the parts of a sentence are elementary sentences, whose parts in
turn are simple words of particular classes. The relation between
these two analyses is seen in the existence of an intermediate
stage between the two, presented in paper 4, From Morpheme to
Utterance. A further intermediate stage is presented in the
writer's String Analysis of Sentence Structure, Papers on Formal
Linguistics I, Mouton, The Hague 1962 (though it was developed
after transformations, as a syntactic rep resentation for
computational analysis). Generalization of both of these analyses
leads to operator grammar, in which each sentence is derived in a
uniform way as a partial ordering of the originally simple words
which enter into it: Each step (least upper bound) of the partial
ordering (of a word requiring another) forms a sentence which is a
component of the sentence being analyzed."
The selection of papers reprinted here traces the development of
syntax from structural linguistics through transformational
linguistics to operator gram mar. These three are not opposing
views or independent assumptions about language. Rather, they are
successive stages of investigation into the word combinations which
constitue the sentences of a language in contrast to those which do
not. Throughout, the goal has been to find the systemati cities of
these combinations, and then to obtain each sentence in a uniform
way from its parts. In structural analysis, the parts were words
(simple or complex, belonging to particular classes) or particular
sequences of these. In transformational analysis, it is found that
the parts of a sentence are elementary sentences, whose parts in
turn are simple words of particular classes. The relation between
these two analyses is seen in the existence of an intermediate
stage between the two, presented in paper 4, From Morpheme to
Utterance. A further intermediate stage is presented in the
writer's String Analysis of Sentence Structure, Papers on Formal
Linguistics I, Mouton, The Hague 1962 (though it was developed
after transformations, as a syntactic rep resentation for
computational analysis). Generalization of both of these analyses
leads to operator grammar, in which each sentence is derived in a
uniform way as a partial ordering of the originally simple words
which enter into it: Each step (least upper bound) of the partial
ordering (of a word requiring another) forms a sentence which is a
component of the sentence being analyzed."
To the philosopher, the logician, and the linguist, questions have
a special fascination. The two main views of language, that it
describes the world, and that it expresses thought, are not
directly applicable to questions. Ques tions are not assertions. A
question may be apt, sharp, to the point, impor tant, or it may be
inappropriate, ambiguous, awkward, irrelevant or irreverent. But it
cannot be true or false. It does not have a truth value not just
because an utterance like Was the letter long? does not indicate
which letter is being talked about. The indicative The letter was
not long has the same indeter minacy. In actual context the
anaphoric definite article will be resolved both for a question and
for an indicative sentence. Contextual resolutions are easily found
for most cross-references. A question cannot be either true or it
does not describe a state of affairs. Neither does it express
false, because thought, because it is an expression of suspended
thought, of lack of judge ment. To dress it in other philosophical
styles, a question is not a judgment, it is not a proposition, it
is not an assertion. A philosopher may try to paraphrase a question
as an indicative sentence, for instance as a statement of
ignorance, or as a statement of the desire to know. Hintikka,
Wachowicz and Lang explore this territory. Or he may interpret it
as a meta statement intimating the direction in which the flow of
the discourse is going."
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