Targets and Paradigmatic Borrowing in Romantsch

Abstract

Recent work in generative grammar has demonstrated the relationship between surface structure constraints and transformational rules. In some cases, various unrelated rules have been found to interact, and, in so doing, to satisfy a given constraint, characterized as a target. Evidence is presented that Vallader, a Romantsch dialect, has a phonological target, realized by a number of rules, some peculiar to that dialect. In addition, Vallader shares a syntactic deletion rule with the other Romantsch dialects. In order to satisfy both of these conditions at once, Vallader has resorted to paradigmatic borrowing for one form of the present indicative. 1. Almost all languages seem to permit varying degrees of systematic syntactic ambiguity. The fact that speakers do, in fact, recognize such ambiguities provided one of the earliest and most cogent arguments for the psychological reality of 'deep structure' and for a system of transformational operations that related deep structures to the actual surface structures that we hear and speak. For some time now, transformational analysis has been preoccupied with the exploration, and the justification, of increasingly abstract syntactic structures, which approach semantic representation in direct proportion to their degree of