ABSTRACT
In claiming that considerations of meaning place certain demands upon syntax, I am also effectively claiming that syntax is not autonomous. In fact, I have already tried to motivate a variety of syntactical phenomena. In the ‘Higher-order grammatical categories’ section of Chapter 4, I suggested that AUX (or INFL) can be justified as a category of meaning by reference to the assertoric role of a main verb; and in the ‘Rules of syntax’ section of Chapter 10, I suggested that the way in which an auxiliary verb appears at the front of an interrogative sentence corresponds to the way in which an assertoric role affects the meaning of a sentence as a whole (and not merely the meaning of a verb). Again, in a footnote to the ‘How sentences work together’ section of Chapter 4, I suggested a natural reason for the highly flexible positioning of such inter-sentence connectives as ‘however’, ‘thus’, ‘though’ and ‘on the other hand’; and in a footnote to the last section of the previous chapter, I suggested a possible syntagmatic motivation for what used to be called ‘Particle Movement’. Last but not least, in the ‘Possibility from Piaget’ section of Chapter 7, I suggested that even the categories of noun, verb and adjective may be derived by reflective abstraction from pre-linguistic cognitive processes. Behind all of these suggestions lies the assumption that the conventions of syntax are not arbitrary and self-created, but typically owe their form to something outside of syntax.
