In Consequence of Speaking

Abstract

When one gazes into his crystal ball and attempts to foresee the future course of transformational research into meaning and the use of language, the view is somewhat clouded by the scarcity of substantial past achievements and the lack of well-established approaches to research problems. There is, unfortunately, just no denying that the remarkable successes of transformational grammar in the area of syntax have not been paralleled by commensurate achievements in the realm of meaning. The regrettable dearth of inspiring research successes on which to model future efforts does not result from a lack of enterprise; for a dozen or more years now, a number of capable linguists have devoted considerable energy to supplementing transformational syntax with a semantic system. The literature on meaning is possibly more voluminous than that on syntax. All this toil has not yielded the solid results that were hoped for, however, and at a forward-looking moment such as the present symposium it may be in order to cast our view briefly backwards and inquire into the causes of this failure.

In preparing this paper, I have benefitted greatly from conversations with Lauri Karttunen. He should not be taken, however, as agreeing with everything I say here. I am indebted for support of this research to a grant from the Sloan Foundation to the Institute for Advanced Study, and indebted also to the Research Workshop on Alternative Theories of Syntax and Semantics conducted by the Mathematical Social Science Board at the University of California, Berkeley, in the summer of 1975.