Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2006, Page 161

Setningafrœði og tónfræði 159
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SUMMARY
‘Syntax and musicology’
Keywords: movement rules, competence, performance, chord inversions
This squib discusses the fact that it is often difficult for students of linguistics (and
others) to understand the role and nature of derivations in linguistic descriptions, and
syntactic movement rules in particular. It is argued that the method of assuming a
movcment mle like Topicalization, for instance, relating, say, an object in sentence-
initial position to the default object position after the main verb in a language like
Icelandic, is similar in nature to a common way of describing chord inversions in
music. It is thus common in musicology to say, for instance, that the first inversion of
a C-major chord is formed by “moving” the root up one octave, “deriving” the in-
verted C-chord E-G-C from the normal form C-E-G. The C in the topmost position of
the first inversion of the C-major chord is still interpreted as the root of the chord,
much as a topicalized object is still interpreted as the object of the relevant sentence
although it is not in the default object position. But this does not imply that a piano
Player, for instance, actually “moves” the root from the lowest position to the highest
V/hen playing. Similarly, assuming Topicalization as a mle of grammar does not
necessarily imply that the speaker actually “first” forms a sentence with default word
order when speaking and “then” moves the object to its initial position. Drawing this
parallel between musicology and syntax might help students of linguistics (and
others) understanding the tme nature of syntactic movement mles — or linguistic
derivations in general — and distinguishing between competence and performance.
föskuldur Þráinsson
islenskuskor
fáskóla íslands
Arnagarði við Suðurgötu
IS-10] Reykjavík, ICELAND
hoski@hi.is