Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 286

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have taken an agent out of our stock of possibilities and left
all the others out of consideration. The sentence kornet skördades
is perfectly correct; the sentence (...) skördade kornet is un-
grammatical, since it lacks a subject. The difference is the
main reason why we have a passive voice. Therefore, when
Chomsky says that passive sentences without an agent are
elliptical, he is profoundly wrong.
(2) There are some mistakes in the Swedish examples.
Han lár komma. Han lar det is perfect colloquial Swedish. There
is no difference, in my variety of Swedish, in correctness
between Holmström kan simma, och Bergström kan det ocksá and
brevet kan gáförlorat, och boken kan det ocksá.
Els Oksaar: Professor Kiparsky comes to the conclusion that
logic is not an adequate model for the semantics of natural
languages. He does not give us a new model.
This statement, however, has been commonplace in sem-
antics during the present century and it is found in the writings
of Erdmann, Paul, and Wellander, to mention only a few.
The label of ‘semantic’ of ‘lexical extension rules’ on problems
well known in European semantics for a long time (cf. also
Gustav Stern’s analyses) does not explain the phenomenon
itself. Leisi’s Der Wortinhalt (grd ed., 1967), his oþerationelle
Semantik can be of use when dealing with semantic rules. It is
also possible that the socio-psychological approach of Buhler,
unknown to, or misunderstood by, many linguists, especially
his systematization of the sprachliche Semantizitat (cf. Unge-
heuer, To Honor Roman Jakobson, 1967), will be an adequate
basis for further methodical investigations in semantics.
JVils Erik Enkvist: The generative machine is becoming more
and more complicated, and correspondingly less amenable
to strict formalization, as it tries to integrate a growing number
of considerations: focus, given or new, fact or non-fact, referen-
tials implying summaries of varying stretches of discourse,
and so on. I suppose this is the reason why some linguists
have hinted at the possibility of returning to old and venerable
traditions by separating certain components—say, a logic