ABSTRACT
Just as in the case of (1a,b) a structural constraint can be stated that rules (3) ungrammatical.1 In this chapter, I shall consider the further question of whether the effect of this constraint follows from some independent considerations. An account of such structures has recently been proposed in a paper by James Higginbotham and Robert May (1979), (henceforth HM), to which I shall refer as the pragmatic solution. This crucially involves a pragmatic principle that is often assumed in some form in the different approaches to the problem of the interaction of content and context, represented at this conference. I should like to argue below that this solution, although at first sight plausible, is not tenable. I shall present an alternative explanation, one that involves what are probably not pragmatic principles but rules of grammar.
