[In this book] I examine the general conditions under which verbal complements are licensed, and provide a possible explanation for their limited distribution. The primary reference language is English, though the proposed licensing conditions for verbal complements are assumed to hold universally.
Fortunately, the author adds:
That the main proposals of this study and the analyses do indeed carry over to other languages is shown in Chapter 5, which takes a cross-linguistic perspective.
The title of Chapter 5? "Direct Perception Complements in Other European Languages". The languages considered are German, Dutch, Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, representing a grand total of two neighboring subfamilies of Indo-European.
I don't mean to poke fun at this book specifically - it looks like a very thorough analysis of clausal complements of perception verbs in English - but this so neatly encapsulates what in practice is one of the main problems of the generative program: over-reliance on English in particular and what Sapir used to call "Standard Average European" in general.
4 comments:
Facing proponents of generative grammar or minimalist program or whatever it's called these days, I always bring up either Georgian or Korean. Universals, he?
I remember once having seen on TV a linguist explaining where various word orders are found on the globe. Then he gave an example of a word order that wasn't found anywhere, he said. It happened to be a word order required by German grammar in some places. Funny thing is, the whole documentary (on Arte, IIRC) had voice-over in German.
That's pretty funny - can you remember which word order it was?
Unfortunately not, it was several years ago. It was one of the imaginable variations of, IIRC, "today evening I'll eat dinner with [name]".
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