Читать книгу Collocations, Creativity and Constructions - Cordula Glass - Страница 18

While Chomsky himself in his earlier works focuses on syntactic structures and their interrelation, Katz and Fodor consider a semantic branch for generative grammar. Their idea for Interpretive Semantics is quite similar to Plato’s early conception. Picking up on the idea of an inborn linguistic faculty, Katz and Fodor (1963) married platonic, universalist thinking with a concept from structural semantics: componential analysis (Leech 1974: 95–125; Palmer ²1981: 108–107) attempts to break lexical items into their smallest meaningful units, thus formulating the basic semantic components of a word. Katz and Fodor took these structures and established them as the mentally stored cornerstone of their Interpretive Semantics. They assume that, through a system of projection rules, these formal dictionary entries are transformed to fit into a given context. As a consequence, every meaning of a lexical entry needs to be accounted for in the first place to make a transformation and ultimately understanding as such possible. Katz and Fodor give the example of bachelor which, according to the authors, has four different readings: 1) a human male who has never married, 2) a young human male knight serving under the standard of another king, 3) a human who has the first or lowest-level academic degree and 4) a young male fur seal (animal) without a mate during the breeding season. The adequate interpretation of bachelor in a sentence like The old bachelor finally died. would then be disambiguated by the premodification old, since reading 1) is not blocked by the marker young and can, therefore, be used in connection with old without any interpretative clashes (Katz/Fodor 1963: 189–190). Unfortunately, Katz and Fodor do not comment on the reason why option 3), a person with a certain kind of academic degree, might not be possible either. There are cases where even reading 4) might be constructed, for example in a conversation between two zoo keepers. Furthermore, the actual age of the bachelor might also depend on the context. Prototypically, this sentence of course triggers the image of rather advanced age, maybe a gentleman in his nineties comes to mind, yet it might also be used in a situation where people are talking about the death of a generally unpleasant and ardently detested acquaintance who was single for most of his life and died after some years of illness at the age of 40. Here, old would hardly be regarded as ‘old age’ and would probably refer to the fact that this person had been a bachelor for most of his life. Nevertheless, this sentence within this slightly unusual context would presumably be both acceptable and interpretable if it were encountered within the right setting, for example as an ironic remark in a book. In order to provide for all potential readings of man, the potential interpretations would even be more diverse, reaching from the more prototypical adult, male human, to a very broad understanding along the line of ‘all human beings’, up to the somewhat seemingly contradictory reading of ‘male human, but with female characteristic’ as in the example of pretty man. Furthermore, like most approaches within the framework of Universal Grammar before it, Interpretive Semantics presupposes an ideal speaker-hearer who has total command of the whole of the English language. Especially in a meaning-related context, this seems to be a rather unrealistic conception, since not only does the size of a speaker’s vocabulary vary from individual to individual (Clark 1995, 1993; Anglin 1993), but the different readings of a lexical entry might also be only partially available to him/her, even for native speakers of a language. So, it could well be that not every adult native speaker of English is aware of the fact that bachelor could, amongst others, refer to a ‘knight’ or a ‘fur seal’.

Of course, some of these examples sketch a very rare use of bachelor or man. But any description of linguistic processes needs to be able to account for less frequent or creative applications as well. At the same time, this is why an analysis of collocations and their more creative alternations not only has the potential to gain insight into the creative process at work but can also explain aspects of a speaker’s language processing in general. Admittedly, Katz and Fodor explicitly stress that what they introduce is a “characterization” rather than a “semantic theory of a natural language” (Katz/Fodor 1963: 170). Nevertheless, in their framework too, the idea of a contextual setting is already an important variable for the semantic interpretation of sentences (Katz/Fodor 1963: 176–181), even if it struggles to explain the interpretation of creative or even partly contradictory readings, as demonstrated above. Nonetheless, the question of the origin of meaning in general and creative readings in particular should be central to any semantic theory, irrespective of whether it is trying to explain naturally occurring utterances or a stylized linguistic system. Together with Postal, Katz also developed a theory which argues that meaning remains constant across generative transformations (Katz/Postal 1964). According to the Katz-Postal Hypothesis, semantic representations are allocated in a sentence’s deep structure1, while actual sentences are a result of transformations and represent different surface structures, all of which share the same deep structure. Therefore, Katz and Postal (1963) also suggest treating sentences with an idiomatic reading, like to kick the bucket, as one possible surface structure which shares the same deep structure as the more literal to die (Prinz 1983). Similar2 to the concept of Interpretive Semantics, this Generative Semantic approach also presupposes that potential semantic representations are already part of the deep structure, which makes it difficult to account for spontaneous, creative alternations and readings within this theory.