Commentary

Consequently, Seuren & Wekker (1986: 64) propose that "any theory of S[emantic] T[ransparency] will have to be formulated in terms of a grammar that defines the mapping relations between surface structures and semantic analyses".Had McWhorter drawn the consequences from this uncontroversial and theory-neutral point of view, his proposals concerning syntactic and semantic complexity could have been more specific and better motivated, and thus more interesting, than they have turned out to be.He might, for one thing, have followed Seuren & Wekker (1986), when they discuss scope relations in semantic analyses.As the scope-bearing elements in logical structure are "lowered" into the lexical matrix-S, the elements with larger scope tend to stay to the left of those with smaller scope (compare Not many trains are comfortable versus Many trains are not comfortable).This left-to-right correspondence constraint is, however, totally disregarded in morphology, which makes Seuren & Wekker (1986: 68) observe: This, again, leads to a ban on morphology, since, as is well known, morphological processing of lowered elements leads to a massive violation of this scope-order correspondence, and thus requires a great deal more cognitive processing than is needed for sentences with a regular scope-order correspondence.In this light it is not surprising to find that in many creole languages verbal tenses, modalities and aspects are expressed by means of preverbal particles, and not by morphological means, as in the majority of more advanced languages.The occurrence of such particles is a direct reflex of their semantic scope after lowering.1. McWhorter's discussion of the "one form -one meaning" constraint is, moreover, less than satisfactory.It is left without any further specification, and is, in fact, considered exclusively in terms of lexicalisation, a topic hardly touched upon in Seuren & Wekker (1986).