On so-called fused constructions

Bas Aarts
University College London
|

In many grammars constructions like the following are dealt with confusingly, or in a contradictory fashion:

(i)         I like those books/I like those.
(ii)        the poor, the French, the Dutch
(iii)       I liked what I saw.

Specifically, grammars often cannot decide whether in (i) the word those in the two constructions shown belongs to the same word class or to different word classes. In (ii) there is uncertainty as to whether words like poor, French and Dutch are adjectives or nouns, or something else altogether. And in (iii) the italicised string is analysed either as a special kind of clause (‘free relative clause’, ‘nominal relative clause’) or as a noun phrase, or both.

In my talk I will discuss a number of approaches to these syntactic puzzles. In particular, I will look at their treatment in Huddleston and Pullum’s Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. To deal with these structures, this grammar posits the existence of a number of so-called fused constructions, such that in (i) in both cases the word those belongs to the word class of determinative. This item 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.

In my talk I will signal a number of problems for the account offered by Huddleston and Pullum 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. Wielding Occam’s Razor I will contend that we can analyse these constructions by appealing to empty heads instead.

Reference

Huddleston, R. and G. K. Pullum (2002) The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.