Monday, 30 March 2015

Tom Bartlett Mistaking A Clause For A Clause Complex (inter alia)

Jing Fang - thanks very much for the grammatically reasoned response. I agree with your method but, at the risk of sounding pig-headed, I would say both the following sound absolutely fine to me (I'll also try and find corpus examples* before Aachen!):
All he wants in life is an enjoyable job and to earn a good wage.

What do you want in life? An enjoyable job and to earn a good wage.

The Google gods were smiling on me! I googled "all he wants is a" + "and to" and at the top of just page two I found:
All he wants is a bit of cover and to attack late.
(I will only accept adding "to have" if you ALWAYS analyse the structure this way, thereby eliminataing [sic] WANT + Phen altogether - which I think mirrors the Cardiff approach once again - Robin?).

Blogger Comments:

[1] Bartlett's two clauses are encoding identifying clauses in which the Token is realised by an extending nominal group complex involving a nominal group and a rankshifted clause functioning as nominal group.  They do not involve a logical relation across ranks between a nominal group and a ranking clause, as Bartlett seems to believe.  See analysis here.

[2] Here Bartlett presents himself — rather than the theory or logically valid reasoning — as the arbiter of theory-consistent  or otherwise arguable analyses.

[3] Bartlett's 'WANT + Phenomenon' analysis demonstrates that he has mistaken these identifying relational clauses for desiderative mental clauses.  The mental clause he wants (in life) is rankshifted and functioning as Qualifier in a nominal group all [[he wants (in life)]] functioning as Value.

[4] Adding "to have" and eliminating "want(s)" — there is no Phenomenon to eliminate — yields the nonsensical:
All he in life is to have an enjoyable job and to earn a good wage
All he is to have a bit of cover and to attack late 

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