The aim of this paper is to investigate the nature and status of selectional restrictions in transformational generative grammar by comparing the respective proposals by Chomsky, McCawley and Kuroda from an empirical point of view.
In the first half ...
The aim of this paper is to investigate the nature and status of selectional restrictions in transformational generative grammar by comparing the respective proposals by Chomsky, McCawley and Kuroda from an empirical point of view.
In the first half of this paper (i.e. § 1-4), I would like to show that selectional restrictions are semantically based restrictions on co-occurrences of lexical items. and that they are to be characterized quite distinctly from purely syntactic phen-omena such as those involved in the selection of correct forms of pronouns and relative.
In the second half(i.e. § 1-5) I would like to allude to some interesting phenomena which call for explanation, and discuss an aspect of "degree of semantic well-forme-dness" and finally, some difficulties or impossibilities in describing them in terms of presently available theoretical frameworks of selectional restrictions.