The generative view of autonomy of syntax has been criticized by most cognitive-functional grammarians and claimed to be incompatible with or unable to account for iconicity that exits in natural human languages. Given this, this paper attempts to explain some iconic aspects in English syntax from a generative perspective in an effort to argue against this cognitive-functional criticism. After examining "structure-concept iconicity" in lexical category phrases and sentential complementation in Newmeyer"s (1992, 1998) sense, I propose the following generative principles of iconicity, embellishing Hwang"s (2005) idea: (ⅰ) when a head is modified by multiple adjuncts, the fewer maximal projections of the head there are between the head and the adjunct, the closer the semantic relation between them is; (ⅱ) when a verb takes minimal pair/set clausal complements, the fewer and morphologically poorer functional heads(C and T) there are between the matrix verb and its clausal complement, the closer the semantic relation between them is. I then claim that Haiman"s (1983, 1985, 1994)"s iconicity of distance, a sub-principle of structure-concept iconicity, is compatible with generative grammar, to a large extent, in that it is well represented structurally in generative grammar outlined in Chomsky (1995, 2001, 2005): the semantically closer the two syntactic objects are, the more local their syntactic relation is in the light of hierarchical structure.
영어 초록<BR>1. Introduction<BR>2. Structure-Concept Iconicity<BR>3. Iconicity in Lexical Category Phrases and Sentential Complementation<BR>4. A Generative Account of Iconicity<BR>5. Conclusion<BR>References<BR>저자소개<BR>
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