Selectional restrictions
المؤلف:
PAUL R. KROEGER
المصدر:
Analyzing Grammar An Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
P73-C5
2025-12-18
38
Selectional restrictions
The examples in (20) in "Properties of a well-formed clause" are grammatical but semantically ill-formed they don’t make sense.1 The examples in (22) are similar. The problem stems from the combination of words used: the subjects of know and sleep must normally be animate beings; the object of drink must be a liquid, while the object of bite must be a solid.
(22) a #My pencil doesn’t know how to spell that word.
b #John drank his sandwich and took a big bite out of his coffee.
c #The idea is sleeping.
Constraints on what lexical items may occur in combination with each other are referred to as selectional restrictions. The violation of a SELECTIONAL RESTRICTION, as in the examples in (20) in "Properties of a well-formed clause" and (22), is sometimes referred to as a COLLOCATIONAL CLASH. Sentence (20a) illustrates two different kinds of collocational clash. First, sausages cannot be said to ‘like’ anything because they are not the kind of thing that can feel emotions. This selectional restriction is based at least partly on our shared knowledge about the world. Second, the adjective young is normally used only for living things. Thus, we may speak of a new sausage, a fresh sausage, or an old sausage, but not# a young sausage. This restriction seems to be an essentially arbitrary fact about the word young.
The famous example in (23) was used by Chomsky (1957) to show how a sentence can be grammatical without being meaningful. What makes this sentence so interesting is that it contains so many collocational clashes: something which is green cannot be colorless; ideas cannot be green, or any other color, but we cannot call them colorless either; ideas cannot sleep; sleeping is not the kind of thing one can do furiously; etc.
(23) #Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
We noted some selectional restrictions on the subjects of know and sleep, and on the objects of drink and bite. However, this way of expressing the restrictions was slightly inaccurate. Selectional restrictions must be stated in terms of semantic roles (agent, patient, etc.) rather than Grammatical Relations (subject, object, etc.). This is illustrated by examples like the following:
(24) a # John drank his sandwich.
b# The sandwich was drunk by John.
(25) a That book is loved by children around the world.
b # Children around the world are loved by that book.
(26) a # Mary taught her motorcycle classical Chinese.
b # Mary taught classical Chinese to her motorcycle.
The examples in (24) show that the patient of drink must be a liquid, whether it appears as object or subject. The examples in (25) show that the verb love requires an animate experiencer, not an animate subject: (25b) which has an animate subject is extremely odd, whereas (25a) which has an in animate subject is perfectly sensible. And (26) shows that the experiencer of teach must be animate, whether it appears as an object or an oblique argument.
Semantic constraints of various kinds are needed to prevent the grammar from producing sentences like those in (20) and (22). Some constraints would be included in the lexical entries of particular words, e.g. the fact that young is used only for living things. Others could perhaps be stated as general rules, e.g. the expectation that experiencers and recipients must normally be animate. Those problems which relate to our non-linguistic knowledge about the world, e.g. the fact that girls may own dogs but not vice versa, may not need to be stated as part of the grammar at all. The main point here is that the Phrase Structure rules themselves do not need to be modified to deal with these sorts of issues.
1 One reason for saying that examples like (20) and (22) are grammatical, even though they sound so odd, is that it would often be possible to invent a context (e.g. in a fairy tale or a piece of science fiction) in which these sentences would be quite acceptable. This is not possible for ungrammatical sentences like those in (21).
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