Compositionality and syntactic generalizations

In this paper we argue that compositional grammars must allow syntactic transfonnations, i.e., rules which have the identity operation as their meaning, in order to enable them to express syntactic generalizations adequately. A consequence of this is that the relation between form and meaning is somewhat indirect, in the following sense: in many cases where there appears to be a direct correlation between aspects of fonn and aspects of meaning, it turns out that the form aspects must be accounted for by one set of rules and the meaning aspects by another.