Mark AronoffStony Brook University

Face the facts:Reading Chomsky’s Remarks on Nominalization after forty

years*

1. Introduction

This short article is a response to a recent reading of Noam Chomsky’s celebrated article, Remarks on nominalization (henceforth Remarks), published in 1970, as well as the article that first picked up on Chomsky’s analysis of nominalizations in Remarks in a serious way, Alec Marantz’s No escape from syntax: don’t try morphological analysis in the privacy of your own lexicon (1997).1 One point that Remarks demonstrates is that the progress of a field is beyond anyone’s control: the lesson that an author wishes to teach and the lesson that the field learns are often far apart. Of course, the same may apply in the present instance and perhaps I am mistaken about the lesson of Remarks, but we may have to wait another forty years to find out.I will concentrate here on argumentation, in particular the interplay among facts, theory, description, and analysis as presented first in the argumentation in Syntactic Structures and later in Remarks. The four components have very different roles in the two works and it is this contrast that I find so interesting. For me, and many others, what was most important about Remarks was neither the theory, nor the analysis, but the facts presented and described. Both of these, which

** Thanks to Florence Villoing for inviting me to contribute this

article, and to Françoise Kerleroux, whose work I have long admired, for providing the occasion. This article arose from a graduate morphology course in Fall 2011 in which we went through classic works in generative morphology. I am grateful to the members of that class for very helpful discussion that modified my own thinking considerably: Ginny Anderson, Emily Benjamin, Amanda Caffary, Andrew Canariato, Sophia Kao, Hijo Kang, Yu-an Lu, Vahideh Rasekhi, Aydogan Yanilmaz, and Oxana Yudina.1

? The Marantz article was published over a decade ago, has been widely read,and has been influential, mistakenly, as I will show towards the end of this article.

involved fine lexical semantic differences between distinct words and even distinct senses of the same word, have had great influence on many researchers working in word formation (derivational morphology) ever since. The analysis, which posits that the lexicon may contain items unspecified as to lexical category whose category is provided only in syntactic context, has had influence only within the school of Distributed Morphology, which relies heavily on the notion of categoriless roots. The theory in Remarks is much less developed, except to the extent that it seeks to integrate lexical and grammatical facts within a single account while allowing for non-transformational solutions for certain types of lexical data. I will show that the theory and analysis provide little insight into the data described and that at least some of the data used to support the analysis contradicts the theory. By contrast, the importance of the analysis and theory in Chomsky’s earliest book, Syntactic Structures, and their influence on the field were much greater than were the theory and analysis of Remarks. What matters most about Remarks are facts and description. My overall point is that sometimes the balance of progress is driven more by description and facts, sometimes more by analysis, and sometimes, but much less frequently than we would like to believe, by theory. In the end, though, what wins out is understanding. When we feel that a work has helped us to understand a phenomenon, then we value the work. Of course, understanding is entirely unmeasurable and there’s the rub.Linguists tend to devalue description in comparison to theory and in most disciplines theoreticians stand highest in the pecking order. But in actual practice, it is more often the describers who gain the greatest honor. Since the turn of the millennium, the Nobel prize in physics, the science universally considered to be the most theoretically driven, has been awarded only three out of eleven times for theoretical work. Most recently, in 2011, the award went to three scientists for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe (for which there is no generally accepted theoretical explanation); in 2010, it went to two scientists “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.” Still, even in physics, although they don’t usually win the big prizes, theoreticians enjoy the greatest esteem, especially the best ones.2. Data, description, analysis, and theory in modern linguistics

Noam Chomsky is the premier theoretical linguist of modern times. He emphasized the role of theory, and by doing so restored grammar and

discussion of grammar to the center of linguistics. In North America before Chomsky, modern linguists saw their primary task as the scientific analysis and description of languages, not the construction of grammars or theories of grammar. They took pains to distinguish their work, which they termed descriptive, from the prescriptions that had preoccupied grammarians for the three centuries since the scope of grammar had been widened beyond Latin and Greek to include the vernacular languages. Accordingly, they avoided the term grammar precisely because of its prescriptive overtones, overtones evidenced from the beginning, as in the OED’s 1640 quote from Ben Jonson’s English Grammar: “Grammar is the art of true, and well speaking a Language.” Leonard Bloomfield, for example, on the very first page of his Language, the bible of American descriptivism, distinguishes the very new field of “Linguistics, the [scientific] study of language” from “the ‘grammar’ and other linguistic instruction in our schools” (Bloomfield 1933, p. 1).Bloomfield’s most influential European precursor was Ferdinand de Saussure, who certainly never shied away from the term theory. Unlike the Americans, he also used the term grammar, but much less centrally and a little oddly. For Saussure, any complex system involving what he called values could be described by a grammar, not just a language. In his posthumous Cours, which follows fairly closely the sequence of his lectures, discussion of the term grammar is delayed until the middle of the book, Chapter VII of the section on synchronic linguistics that forms the heart of the work, in a paragraph that starts as follows:

Static linguistics, or the description of a linguistic state, may be termed grammar in that very precise sense, by no means uncommon, found in expressions like ‘the grammar of chess’, ‘the grammar of the stock market’, etc. These are all cases of complex systems, involving coexisting values. (de Saussure 1916/1983, p. 185)

Chomsky, however, as noted above, has always viewed theory and grammar as central to language in particular, not to just any socially constructed system. Beginning with the title of his very first major work, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, completed in 1955, Chomsky presented linguistic theory as his first and greatest preoccupation and he reclaimed the term grammar in the very first pages of that same work to denote the formal description of a language, as well as on the first page of Syntactic Structures, the 1957 précis of the 1955 book that had begun as lecture notes for undergraduates and that made his name in the field. Chomskyan syntax is still known by the names generative grammar. By contrast, the term descriptivist linguistics quickly came to be seen in opposition not to traditional grammar but rather to modern Chomskyan

generative linguistics, although Matthews (1993) showed much later that Chomsky’s work was deeply rooted in the American descriptive tradition.Ideological overtones aside, though, theory and description are never opposed in practice, since they are inseparable in any discipline: no facts or description exist outside a theory and an analysis. Theory, analysis, and description form the three sides of a triangle and all three serve together to account for facts. As has often been emphasized, all are completely interdependent (including the facts!), though individual works and scholars in any field may differ in their emphasis on one or the other. Rhetorically, the most powerful way to argue for a theory is to show that it provides an explanation for some set of facts, where the explanation consists of an appealing description couched within some analytical framework that is compatible with the theory. Newton, for example, combined his theory (Newton’s laws) with the analytical methods afforded by the calculus to describe velocity and acceleration. Without the analytical tools of the calculus, the theory would have not been capable of providing the deeply satisfying description of the physical world that won over the scientific community of his day and persists even today.

2.1. Description, analysis and theory in Syntactic Structures

Within modern linguistics, the greatest example of how the convergence of theory and analysis provide a description of facts so convincing that it changed the entire field is the presentation of English verbs in Chapter 5 of Syntactic Structures. This book is widely acknowledged as among the most influential works of 20th-Century cognitive science. The heart of Syntactic Structures consists of a single long argument about the form that a grammar must have if it is to describe the facts of English in a revealing manner. Chomsky first shows that a one-dimensional grammar that treats a sentence simply as a string and moves from a given word to the next without recourse to a wider context cannot describe English, because of dependencies between words that are not directly adjacent to one another, as they need to be in one-dimensional grammars. Chomsky next discusses phrase structure grammar (or immediate constituent analysis in the terminology of American structuralists), in which words are grouped into larger phrasal units, showing that such a grammar is capable of describing phenomena that the simplest grammars cannot handle, because it can refer to phrasal nodes in a two-dimensional tree.

Chomsky then adds to phrase structure theory a third dimension, transformations, which reorder strings of elements that are produced by the phrase structure grammar. He notes that, although it is possible to describe in purely phrase- structure terms certain of the phenomena that he describes by means of transformations, the resulting grammar will be “extremely complex, ad hoc, and ‘unrevealing’” (Chomsky 1957, p. 34). Very quickly, we move to the description and analysis of English main and auxiliary verbs that made Chomsky famous, at whose heart lies a transformation that later came to be called affix-hopping. Chomsky’s basic insight was that, no matter how complex a particular English verbal expression, every auxiliary verb determines the form of the verb that follows it. Thus, if we compare John has read the book with John has been reading the book, the auxiliary verb have in both sentences is followed by a past participle form; simply put, the auxiliary verb have must be followed by a past participle. Similarly, a modal verb (can, may, must, etc.) will always be followed by a bare verb form: John may read the book vs. John may have read the book vs. John may be reading the book; and the progressive auxiliary be must be followed by a present participle. Chomsky accounts for this relation between an auxiliary and whatever follows it in two steps: first with a phrase structure rule that pairs each auxiliary with an abstract affix (have-en, be-ing, etc.), and then with a transformation that switches each abstract affix with the following verb, resulting in a verb-suffix combination that can then be spelled out.The phrase structure rule works as follows:Aux Tense marker (Modal verb) (have + en) (be + ing) (be + en)The transformation switches any of the bolded items (all of which are abstract affixes) with the following verbal element and the result is exactly what we need: each verbal element receives the proper abstractly affixed form that is determined by the preceding auxiliary, if there is one. Furthermore, the first element in the verbal cluster will always bear the tense marker, which is also correct. This description and analysis of English verbs is so beautiful that it won the day for the theory, even though Chomsky admitted from the outset that the whole system could be described using phrase structure and selection, which Gazdar, Pullum, and Sag (1982) later did and which Chomsky himself even advocated at one point (Chomsky 1995). But what makes the affix-hopping analysis stand out is the beauty and simplicity of its description. That is what made us all accept it as an explanation and it was one of the principal causes of Chomsky’s success. In other words, the beautiful analysis and description of some very striking facts was the rhetorical weapon that drove the acceptance of the theory, even though it is the theory that is most remembered.

2.2. Fact and description in Remarks

Moving ahead a dozen years or so, we come to 1970 and Remarks on Nominalization, which appeared in a collection of original papers meant to demonstrate developments in generative syntax in the brief period since Aspects had been published in 1965, a period characterized largely by the generative semantics wars (Harris 1993). Many of the articles in the book reflect this war. Some were popular and influential in their time but only this one piece achieved the status of a true classic: it has been cited thousands of times in the literature. In some sense, Remarks won the war for Chomsky. The heart of Remarks consists of an analysis of English derived nominals within a theory of lexical categories. This analysis has had little influence, though the theory has survived in a very different context. The lesson that most readers took away from Remarks was inspired neither by the analysis nor by the sketch of a theory that Remarks supplied, but instead by the description of the data, which is more detailed. Much later, Marantz excoriated those who learned this lesson. The lesson was correct, however, as I will show below. Spencer, in his survey of morphological theory, puts it as follows: “The primary importance of this paper for morphology was that it pointed to the need for a separate theory of derivational morphology, distinct from the theory of syntactic transformations” (Spencer 1991, p. 69). Marantz calls this “an interestingly contrived reading of Remarks.” (Marantz 1997, p. 214). Both Marantz and Spencer are right. The actual analysis of nominalizations that Chomsky supplied in Remarks was very different from the lesson most of us took away from the article. The editors of the volume characterize this analysis succinctly in their preface:

In the past, certain kinds of noun phrases had been related to sentence structures bearing the same kinds of semantic relations, by means of transformations which moved strings from a deep structure, through a series of derivations, to a surface structure noun phrase. In the course of this, verbs, for example, were converted into nouns. But, argues Chomsky, there is no a priori way of knowing whether the noun forms underlie the verbs or vice versa. Instead of relating alternative forms through transformations, the base rules should be extended to accommodate the alternative forms directly. This is the lexicalist position…(Jacobs and Rosenbaum 1970, p. x)

This general position was preferable to what Chomsky called the “transformational position,” which involves “some extension of the transformational apparatus.” The general lexicalist strategy, extending the base rules to accommodate derivational morphology directly, led to a variety of theories that separated morphology from syntax, as Spencer correctly notes, many of which still flourish today. Chomsky’s specific analysis, however, extended the base rules in a way that never caught on until it was picked up by Marantz (1997), and for good reason: because it was very limited and never accounted in any insightful way for the phenomena that Chomsky described. And if one extends the data just a little bit, it fails completely.

2.3. Underspecification in Remarks

Remarks is a very rich paper and many of the theoretical innovations proposed in it have had wide repercussions in syntactic theory, most prominently X-bar theory, which expresses common structures across phrase-types, and the extension of the scope of the passive construction to even simple nominals like Aristotle’s portrait by Rembrandt. But I will concentrate here on the topic that lies at the core of the article, the difference between what Chomsky called (somewhat peculiarly, given previous use of the term gerundive in traditional grammar) “gerundive nominalizations” and “derived nominals”. His basic observation was that, while the meaning and syntax of the gerund construction was always transparently related to the meaning and syntax of the corresponding verb, the same could not be said of the corresponding derived nominals:

The idiosyncratic character of the relation between the derived nominal and the associated verb has been so often remarked that discussion is superfluous. Consider, for example, such nominals as laughter, marriage, construction, actions, activities, revolution, belief, doubt, conversion, permutation, trial, residence, qualifications, specifications, and so on, with their individual ranges of meaning and varied semantic relations to the base forms. There are a few subregularities that have frequently been noted, but the range of variation and its rather accidental character are typical of lexical structure. To accommodate these facts within the transformational approach (assuming, as above, that it is the grammatical relations in the deep structure that determine meaning), it is necessary to resort to the artifice of assigning a range of meanings to the base forms, stipulating that with certain semantic features the form must nominalize and with others it cannot. Furthermore, the appeal to this highly

unsatisfactory device, which reduces the hypothesis that transformations do not have semantic context no near vacuity, would have to be quite extensive. (Remarks, p. 189)

This description of derived nominals provides the empirical basis for the lexicalist hypothesis and it has never been refuted. The analytical question that Chomsky faces is, if we can’t use syntactic transformations to deal with derived nominals, what device do we use instead to relate them to the corresponding verbs, given “the idiosyncratic character of the relation between the derived nominal and the associated verb?” Chomsky’s solution is as follows:

Let us propose, then, as a tentative hypothesis, that a great many items appear in the lexicon with fixed selectional and strict subcategorization features, but with a choice as to the features associated with the lexical categories noun, verb, adjective. The lexical entry may specify that semantic features are in part dependent on the choice of one or another of these categorical features. This is, of course, the typical situation within the lexicon; in general, lexical entries involve certain Boolean conditions on features, expressing conditional dependencies of various sorts. Insofar as there are regularities, these can be expressed by redundancy rules in the lexicon. (Remarks, p. 190)

In simpler terms, the idea here is that the lexicon will contain an entry, LAUGH, for example, that is not specified as either verb or noun, but that will be given either a verb or noun category and form (laugh vs. laughter) when it is inserted in an appropriate spot in the syntactic tree. It might even be that the noun and verb are semantically distinct, which can be encoded in the lexical entry by means of Boolean conditions on features (presumably of the sort if noun, then semantic feature q). This solution generated much less interest in the quarter century following than the description of the problem laid out on the previous page, in part because it was not worked out in any detail in Remarks. Chomsky already began to find problems with the solution in the footnote to the very paragraph in which he proposed it, noting that it is not clear “whether a lexical entry is regarded as a Boolean function of specified features or is to be replaced by a set of lexical entries, each of which consists of a set of specified features” (Remarks, fn 12, p. 217) and whether these two approaches are empirically distinct. And ten pages later in the article, he remarks that “only in the simplest case will exactly the same contextual (and other) features be associated with an item as a verb and as a noun. In general, lexical entries involve sets of shared features, organized in complex and little

understood ways, and we should expect to find the same phenomenon in the case of derived nominals, given the lexicalist hypothesis.”

2.4. Underspecification meets the facts

In fact, the idea that a pair of lexical items sharing the same stem might be distinct only in their category label is directly contradicted by the extensive set of derived nominals that Chomsky had just cited on the previous page and by his remark that “the range of variation and its rather accidental character are typical of lexical structure.” If the distinction were only in the category label, then one might want to resort to the sort of transformational solution that Chomsky had advocated for gerunds, which are nouns that truly share all the relevant properties of the verbs that they are formed from. But the same comment that dooms a transformational account applies equally to an account involving semantically underspecified categoriless elements that receive specification in context: “it is necessary to resort to the artifice of assigning a range of meanings to the base forms, stipulating that with certain semantic features the form must nominalize and with others it cannot,” a stipulation that, Chomsky reminds us, “reduces the hypothesis that transformations do not have semantic context to near vacuity.” Instead of transformations, we have lexical insertion, but the comment about vacuity applies equally. Underspecification of the meaning of an item out of context (which is what categorilessness demands), followed by specification in individual lexical contexts, can never provide an explanation: it is an artifice entirely equivalent to simply listing the meaning of the full expression in the first place. If the meaning of an expression A + B is unpredictable from the meanings of the expressions A and B but must rather be stipulated as a property of the complex expression A + B, sometimes completely, as Chomsky notes in the case of derived nominals, then underspecification of A or B will never provide a satisfying account of the stipulated differences, only a means of hiding the truth.Towards the end of the article, Chomsky mentions and then does not discuss at all a type of nested structures that underspecification can have nothing at all to say about: “As is well-known, processes of derivational morphology are applicable in sequence – they may even be recursive.” (Remarks, p. 212). The examples he mentions are readable and readability (derived in sequence from read) and self-indulgent and self-indulgence (derived in sequence from indulgent). He then goes on to argue for two pages against a transformational analysis of these pairs. But nowhere does he discuss the problem that these nestings present for his underspecification analysis.

Nesting of derivational affixes is quite common in English and in many other languages. Consider the five following examples. All end in the deadjectival abstract nominal suffix –ness but each contains a different denominal adjective suffix. The general pattern is X]N Y]A ness]N. Each example is drawn from a large set of words:

quirk]N i]A ness]N matron]N li]A ness]N hope]N less]A ness]N

boor]N ish]A ness]N pain]N ful]A ness]N

Each example represents a triplet of words like quirk, quirky, quirkiness. We cannot use underspecification to handle these triplets. Let’s say we wanted to relate quirk and quirky through underspecification: the basic entry will be QUIRK and it has no category. When QUIRK occupies a noun slot, it gets no suffix and is spelled out as quirk, but when it occupies an adjective slot it gets the suffix –y. Now what do we do with quirkiness? It is based on a category-bearing word, quirky. We can’t claim that quirky bears no category, because we just gave it one. We might instead try to claim that quirkiness contains a complex suffix –iness, based on the categoriless QUIRK. But that would force is to say that –liness, -lessness, -ishness, and –fulness and any other suffix combination are all complex suffix. And what would it mean anyway to call something a complex suffix? Does it have internal parts? Are they compositional? How do these suffixes relate to the simple suffix –ness that occurs in words like redness? The answer is that a theory with underspecification of lexical category cannot handle nested morphology. Even when there are no affixes, it is still possible to show that unspecified forms will not do the job. Consider the two noun/verb zero-derived pair types exemplified by pilotn/pilotv and runv/runn. Both Clark and Clark (1979) and Aronoff (1980) discuss the first pair at great length, with very different analyses. Marchand (1969) has discussed the second more briefly. Basically, the verb in the first construction denotes some activity that has something to do with the noun, so that the noun must be treated as basic in order to get the semantics to work right (whatever one’s analysis). The second type, which is much less productive, goes in the opposite direction. Here the verb sense must be basic and the noun means, in Marchand’s words ‘single instance illustrative of the active process’ of the verb (Marchand 1969, 374). Marchand notes that the verb is usually intransitive. If one operates with categoriless elements, then there is no way to even begin to discuss the difference between the two types. And then there are recursive cases like walkv/walkn/walkv, in baseball, where the last sense means ‘To force in (a run) by giving up a walk with the bases loaded’, as in Marshall walked home two more runs. If one tries to derive the transitive sense directly from the intransitive, then one has to deal with the fact that the object of the transitive is the inanimate

noun run. But an analysis in which the noun is derived from the first verb as an instance and then the second sense of the verb is an activity having something to do with the noun, makes perfect sense.Of course, it is cases like these that led people to begin to work on derivational morphology as a grammatical module whose function is to form and analyze what Chomsky calls “the lexical categories N, A, V.” (Remarks p. 210) There are too many theories of derivational morphology to discuss here, but all share the basic feature of being designed to deal with “the idiosyncratic character of the relation between” any two lexical items.

3. Marantz’s analysis

Almost thirty years after the publication of Remarks, Alec Marantz revived Chomsky’s analysis of English derived nominals in a paper arguing against the notion that derivational morphology was a separate module from syntax. Marantz defines a straw-man variety of lexicalism as follows:

Lexicalism: words are created in the Lexicon, by processes distinct from the syntactic processes of putting morphemes/words together. Some phonology and some structure/meaning connections are derived in the lexicon, while other aspects of phonology and other aspects of structure/meaning relations are derived in (and after) the syntax. (Marantz 1997, p. 201)

According to Marantz, “Lexicalism claims that the syntax manipulates internally complex words, not unanalyzable atomic units.” Marantz provides in this paper what he bizarrely calls “the alternative that allows us to dump lexicalism once and for all” (Ibid. p. 202). What allows Marantz to ‘dump’ lexicalism is Chomsky’s analysis of derived nominals in Remarks, but formulated within the theory of Distributed Morphology, which incorporates three separate ‘lexicons’. First is a lexicon of “atomic roots” that are similar to the unspecified “base forms” of Remarks. There is a second lexicon, which Marantz calls the vocabulary, where roots and complex entities apparently receive their phonological forms, and a third, which he calls the encyclopedia: “The Encyclopedia lists the special meanings of particular roots, relative to the syntactic context of the roots, within local domains.” (Ibid. p. 204). This last is equivalent to Chomsky’s listing of derived nominals and their meanings and suffers from the same fatal conceptual difficulties, which I will not rehearse here. In this theory “the grammar constructs all the words in the syntax by the same general mechanisms” (Ibid. p. 205), so that there is no special morphological component. Marantz

notes first, in defense of this claim, that words have no particular lock on idiosyncratic meaning. Phrases may also be “in the lexicon.” This is true, but it has nothing to do with lexicalism, which has long noted that the term lexical has two senses (Aronoff 1983, 1988; Disciullo and Williams 1986; Williams 1981), one meaning ‘idiosyncratic or unpredictable’, the other meaning ‘word internal’, which denote two quite different things. Marantz confuses these two senses. The lexicalist hypothesis that most of us use says only that what goes on within the lexeme or word is different from what goes on outside it and has nothing to say about unpredictability:

The lexicalist hypothesis, at least in its more common weak version . . . is a hypothesis about syntax and not about morphology. It consists simply of drawing a dividing line along the syntactic dimension between lexeme formation and supralexical syntax. To draw this line is to claim only that syntax operates differently in the two domains, above and below it . . . (Aronoff 1994, p. 15)

Williams (2007), puts the same hypothesis slightly differently:The Lexical Hypothesis is about the organization of the grammar into modules. It suggests that the system of words in a language is independent of the system of phrases in a language in a particular way. It is independent of it, but communicates with it through a narrow channel—the “top-level” properties of words. (Williams 2007, p. 353).

For Marantz, though, the line is not at the word or lexeme, but at the root: “Things with special meanings are roots . . . Words are usually also identified by their root content, where the roots are the items subject to special contextual meanings.” (p. 13). Here is where the analysis of Remarks comes in. Marantz starts his analysis by noting that the idea that lexical items are complex items has its origins in X-bar theory. This is simply wrong. Chomsky introduced this idea in the last section of Aspects (1965), which also contains the beginnings of the analysis provided in Remarks. That aside, Marantz provides the following “up-date” of Chomsky’s Remarks theory:

Nominalizations like “destruction” and “growth” . . .are never “verbs” at any stage in the derivations, and thus DPs . . . are not transformationally related to sentences… Roots like DESTROY and GROW are category neutral, neutral between N and V. When the roots are placed in a nominal environment, the result is a “nominalization”; when the roots are placed in a verbal environment, they become verbs. (Marantz 1997, p. 215)

Marantz then recapitulates Chomsky’s argument for why the nominalization growth is only intransitive, while the verb may be either

transitive or intransitive, while the opposite is true for destruction. This is because “while certain operations cut across N-headed and V-headed phrases, …. certain syntactic structures require the verbal environment. In particular, the agent of transitive “grow” is …. a type of causative agent projected only in a verbal environment.” (Ibid. p. 216).

3.1. Two senses of grow

Marantz provides a complex syntactically based solution for why all this should be the case. But, as I pointed out in the first work I ever published (Aronoff 1974), the real problem here has nothing to do with syntax, or even morphology. It is simply that the verb grow has two quite distinct types of senses in Chomsky’s examples, which he did not notice, while the noun growth has a sense corresponding to only one of these.2 The intransitive verb can mean either GROW1 ‘exist as a living plant in a specified environment’ (Corn grows well in this area) or GROW2 ‘increase in size’: The corn grew a foot a day; his anger grew by the moment. GROW1 has a related transitive similar in sense to raise or cultivate: We grow corn in this area. GROW2 does not: *We grew the corn a foot a day; *the incident grew his anger beyond the point of containment. The nominal growth has many distinct senses but is no longer used in a sense corresponding to GROW1: *the growth of corn in this area (except in the expression the growth of crystals). However, it is frequently used in a sense corresponding to GROW2 ‘increase in size’, which we may call GROWTH2: the growth of the economy.3 It also has a different, concrete sense GROWTH3 with no clearly related verbal sense, ‘morbid formation’, as in his head was 2

? A quick glance at the OED reveals that grow has many senses, as do rise and raise, discussed below, but it will suffice to discuss the two senses in question here in each case.3

? Bill Clinton, in his 1992 campaign for President, used the slogan grow the economy, which had the ‘cause to increase in size’ sense that was previously missing for GROW2 (OED Online has only one citation for this causative sense, from William Caxton in 1481). The causative sense has become more common in the last two decades, as Emily Benjamin points out to me, but only with economic terms as the direct object: jobs, business, etc. The intransitive verb GROW2 and the noun growth have been used in reference to business and the economy since the 1950’s. The wonderful term growthmanship was popular in the 1960’s, but seems to have fallen into desuetude.

covered with growths.

The table below expresses the facts:GROW1 ‘exist as a plant’ GROW2 ‘increase in size’ GROW(TH)3 ‘morbid

formation’

intransitive (corn grows here)

intransitive (corn grows quickly here)

*intransitive ??

transitive (grow corn) *transitive (*we grew corn rapidly)

*transitive ??

*nominal (the growth of corn)

nominal (the amazing growth of the corn)

nominal (a growth on her arm)

Chomsky is puzzled (Remarks 214) about why the growth of tomatoes is unambiguously intransitive, while the growing of tomatoes can be either transitive or intransitive.4 He posits an analysis in which the transitive sense of GROW1 contains a causative component, but the noun growth does not contain a causative component, which, he admits, “involves an ad hoc step”. But the explanation for the non-causative reading of growth is simple once we understand that the non-causative of growth corresponds only to GROW2 ‘increase in size’, which has no transitive sense, while the gerund in the growing of tomatoes has sense GROW1 ‘exist as a plant’, which has a transitive meaning roughly ‘cause to exist as a plant’. This explanation has nothing to do with causative features, but simply with the differences between lexical senses. It is a purely lexicalist account. We are in fact dealing with homonyms and so need no real explanation at all.More generally, underspecification of root meanings accompanied by specification in individual lexical contexts can never provide an explanation, because it is equivalent to simply listing the meaning of the full expression in the first place. In the worst case, the analysis forces one to assume that the ‘root’ in isolation has no meaning at all, because its meanings in specific lexical contexts vary so widely. The only gain is self-deluding systematicity: the analyst believes that he or she has extracted a generalization where in fact none lies.Mine is a very particular account that depends on paying attention to the different senses a single phonological form may have, but Marantz has no use for particular accounts, only explanations, and then only those that “explain the systematic behavior of nominals” (Marantz 1997, p. 216). He therefore decides that there is a “grow” class of verbs whose members are either transitive or intransitive but whose 4

? The transitive sense is clearly favored by most speakers, possibly because GROW2 is blocked here by growth.

nominals are intransitive, and a “destroy” class of verbs whose members are transitive but whose nominals may be either transitive or intransitive. This classification conflates the two senses of the verb GROW in the same way Chomsky’s original analysis did and is therefore misconceived from the start. Based on this misconception, Marantz goes on to concoct a fairly elaborate account of the facts at hand. He translates Chomsky’s analysis of the intransitivity of growth by saying that the root GROW is non-agentive, so that, when placed in a nominal environment it can have no agentive argument, but in the verbal environment, “a syntactically projected agent may appear, yielding “John grows tomatoes.” But, as we just saw, the sentence John grows tomatoes contains an entirely different sense of GROW from the growth of tomatoes. The two expressions are unrelated and Marantz’s systematic explanation is a chimera because there are no systematic facts to be explained here. Instead, what needs to be explained is the lack of systematicity.Marantz extends his explanation to other phenomena, but since the legs have been cut out from under it by the facts, there is little use in pursuing it further. And in any case, he persists in the same confusion of homonyms, and sometimes near homonyms . For example, he discusses the verbs raise and rise, noting: “I think one can say, ‘I raised the crane two floors,’ with the internal-cause reading preserved, paralleling then, ‘I grew tomatoes’.” (Ibid. p. 222). What is interesting here is that the verb raise, unlike grow, does have two transitive senses. One means approximately ‘cause to rise’ which has an analogous intransitive rise, but the other meaning, ‘breed (animals)’ or ‘produce (meat, seafood, etc.)’, has no phonologically similar intransitive analogue. Again, the two verbs have nothing to do with one another, so that any attempt to provide a syntactic account for why one has an intransitive analogue while the other does not (which Marantz does for the ‘breed’ sense of raise), is doomed from the start. As Andy Canariato points out, rise is irregular (rise, rose, risen), while raise is completely regular, making it hard to claim that they are the ‘same’ lexical item on any theory. Furthermore, the idea that raise is somehow a “special pronunciation in its transitive use” of rise might seem to make some sense for the ‘cause to rise’ sense of raise but the ‘breed’ sense of the word bears no relation to ‘rise’. Marantz has once again been fooled by phonological similarity. The problem with all of these explanations is exactly the one I identified in the conclusion to my note in 1974:

It is striking, however, that no one had noticed the semantic discrepancy before. Chomsky’s paper is not unknown, the argument based on the fact of (2) [*the farmer’s growth of the corn] is almost as celebrated, and yet all a person had to do was look up the words in a

reputable dictionary, or think about the words a long time: grow – growth. But in this fact of academic history lies the greatest confirmation of the lexicalist hypothesis. It is the characteristic of syntactically related forms that the semantic differences between them remain constant… Schooled in this assumption, the linguist who finds a set of morphologically and semantically related items goes on calmly with his business, believing that whatever differences there are among the members of the set will be constant, predictable, and for his present purpose, disregardable. It is only within the lexicalist hypothesis that we are warned to look more closely at the semantic differences. In fact this hypothesis tells us that morphologically related items that are members of distinct Deep Structure lexical categories may be related semantically in a somewhat haphazard fashion. (Aronoff 1974, p. 162)

4. Conclusion

Syntactic Structures revolutionized the field because it showed the way to a new kind of linguistic analysis. I would argue that Remarks, in the end, will be equally important, but because it did not provide any methodological solution, its effects are taking much longer to be felt. And that is because the lesson of Remarks is not about analysis or even about theory, but about the nature of what is to be described. Remarks shows that language is sometimes messy and that a good description, analysis, and theory, must accommodate the mess, not just step around it or cover it over. Among those who are looking only for generalization, idiosyncrasy is always something to be avoided. But by avoiding idiosyncratic facts, we run the risk of explaining a mirage of our one’s own making. Finally, though, one might ask what drives someone to the sorts of theories he espouses, all facts to the contrary. The answer, I believe, lies in the quest for a grammar in the spirit of Syntactic Structures. If the lexicalist hypothesis is true, then the idea of a unified grammar, what Marantz elsewhere calls a “single-engine theory” is no longer very useful. The principals and the methods that have turned out to provide insight into the internal structure of words, especially derivational morphology, are quite distinct from those that apply in syntax. Morphology turns out to be as much about exceptions as about rules. This does not mean that it is not amenable to rigorous inquiry, only that it does not present the same sorts of patterns that we find in syntax. Brown and Hippisley (2012), for example, show how the

exceptions form a highly structured system of defaults within a computationally implementable framework. Remarks, for at least some of us, ushered in a new era in linguistics, one in which the methods of inquiry have been driven at least as much by the data as by the theory. That is its greatest lesson.Some theoreticians may be disappointed by my conclusion. What it shows, though, is that linguistics has matured as a science to the point where theories can be proven wrong, no matter how appealing they are, not by argument or mud slinging, but by facts.

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