A Linear Grammar of Speech 89
he goes on to state that Chomsky’s demonstration ‘is intended and is to
be understood as a contribution to the elaboration of sentence-oriented
grammars’. It has little relevance to a grammar of used language. Chomsky’s
view has been criticized for merely predicting what people can do without
being able to predict what speakers in pursuit of their communicative needs
tend to do (Pawley and Syder 1983: 193). Furthermore, Chomsky’s argu-
ment rests upon the premise that linguistic competence can be viewed as
the ability to transform a simple underlying structure or kernel through the
operation of a series of syntactic rules into a spoken utterance. The ability
to transform kernels is, however, incapable of explaining why certain lexical
items collocate together and why certain verbs tend not to be used in the
passive and, therefore, appears dubious and incapable of explaining how
speakers produce used language (Gross 1974). Neither can Chomsky’s
argument explain why certain verbs such as reputed and rumoured occur only
in the passive (see Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 1435).
A further argument found in favour of a constituent analysis of language
and, hence contra linear grammars, is the discussion of garden path sentences.^5
Pinker (1994: 212–17) argues that garden path sentences, such as (8), dem-
onstrate that sentences must be parsed correctly prior to understanding.
(8) The horse raced past the barn fell (ibid. 212)He claims that hearers have problems with this sentence because they fi rst
attempt to parse it as:
(9) [the horse] [raced past the barn] fell
NP VP?Once the hearer perceives fell, the hearer is forced to reinterpret raced
past the barn not as the main verb phrase of the sentence but rather as a
reduction of the relative clause that raced past the barn. (8) has the potential
to satisfy a communicative need and so a grammar of speech must be able
to describe it. Brazil (1995: 232), in fact, analyses (8) as follows:
(10) The horse raced past the barn fell
d N Ø v p d n V #The speaker fi rst produces the required N element the horse which anticipates
a V element. However, production of the V element fell is suspended by the
Øvpdn subchain. The suspensive subchain, by defi nition, cannot produce