linguistic analysis - Professor Binkert's Webpage - Oakland University

(40) PLACEMENT: other elements cannot break up units.
In using placement, a linguist will try to see how items can be moved among the putative
units.
a. Ultimately, the students will read the book.
b. The students ultimately will read the book.
c. The students will ultimately read the book.
d. The students will read the book, ultimately.
e. *The ultimately students will read the book.
Thus, the diagnostic PLACEMENT seems to confirm the three units diagramed in (37).
Notice that the manipulations in (38) through (40) have varying results: sometimes grammatical
sentences are produced; other times, ungrammatical ones. In each case, NATIVE SPEAKER
INTUITION can verify the decisions regarding grammaticality. As we have observed, this does not
mean that native speakers always agree on issues of grammaticality, nor is total agreement crucial.
What is crucial is that, for most of the manipulations, most of the results are agreed upon by most
of the speakers. That makes communication between people possible. Their internalized grammars
of English are substantially the same.
According to the diagnostics, the best characterization of the units in (38) through (40) is, in fact,
(37); that is, the three unit structure diagramed in (37) predicts (38) through (40). There is no
manipulation, for example, which demands that “students will” be analyzed as a unit. Similarly,
there is no question in English that will get the answer “will the” indicating that “will the” is not a
unit. Therefore, most linguists today argue that English sentences have three basic units.
Linguists use the manipulations of reference, omission, and placement to distinguish sentences
which superficially seem identical, but which are, in fact, very different. Consider the following
(A=ambiguous; U=unambiguous):
(41) a. He looked up her street. (A) He looked her street up. (U)
b. He looked up her address. (U) He looked her address up. (U)
c. He looked up her dress. (U) *He looked her dress up.
d. He cleaned up her dress. (U) He cleaned her dress up. (U)
Notice that manipulation of these sentences produces different results, indicating that their structure
is different. In a similar way, physicians, auto mechanics, and other professionals find that some
results on tests suggest one diagnosis, while other results suggest a different diagnosis.
Introductory linguistics students make a number of incorrect assumptions when they attempt to show
that a characterization like (37) is justified. First, they assume that the analysis should be obvious
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