Date:  Thu, 3 Apr 1997 16:08:28 -0500
<br>From:  "Peter L. Patrick"  PPATRICK[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]GUVAX.ACC.GEORGETOWN.EDU 
<br>Subject: For-To again
<br>
<br>I'm not sure what the original interest in these was-- location of
<br>"for to" constructions regionally or ethnically, I suppose, for which
<br>E. W. Gilman is certainly right to point us to DARE and other
<br>published sources. But as I hazily recall my syntax courses of a
<br>decade ago, the non-acceptability of "for to" (or "for __ to", as they
<br>would have it) constructions in standard English was important
<br>evidence motivating the distinction between S and S' complement
<br>clauses, and restrictions on the occurrence of "big PRO". (This was in
<br>the days of Chomsky and Lasnik '77 and filter theory, and I have no
<br>idea what the current view is.)
<br>    So far as I know, though Chomskyan syntax recognized that
<br>"for to" occurred in non-standard dialects, the consequences of these
<br>dialects for the organization of grammar were not explored. More to
<br>the point of this list, I don't know of a source for exploring the
<br>regional distribution of such syntactic constructions in a systematic
<br>way-- a syntactic atlas of English dialects. Those with dictionary
<br>entries can be traced through dictionaries, but what does one do with
<br>more abstract items? Any suggestions? Sure there are a few articles
<br>here and there, and Trudgill edited a book on regional syntax a few
<br>years ago; and I've heard of an Italian syntactic atlas, I believe;
<br>but what about our own much-examined language? Has the opposition
<br>between traditional dialectology and generative syntax prevented the
<br>emergence of such reference works?
<br>    --plp
<br>