This volume has a very special meaning to me personally. The author, Paul Postal, has played a big role in my development as a linguist in various ways, and I welcome this opportunity that fate has offered me to be able to acknowledge that publicly.
It was in the early 1970s that I first became aware of Paul as a major figure in the heady, still-somewhat-early days of generative grammar. I was a senior majoring in linguistics at Yale, where Paul, as it happens, had earned his Ph.D. in 1963, well before my time, and in my syntax class with Professor Guy Carden, I heard about the Katz-Postal Hypothesis (Katz and Postal 1964) and its important role in advancing syntactic theory.1
But my real introduction to Paul’s work was when his masterful book, On Raising, came out in 1974. I was near the end of my first year or at the start of my second year in graduate school at Harvard and was beginning to get interested in Raising since Greek, my primary research language, had some quirks in its Raising constructions. I found the book fascinating—I read it cover-to-cover, working through the arguments, checking the English data against my own judgments, and drinking it all in. It also helped that I was exposed at that time to a new theory of syntax—Relational Grammar—developed by Paul in collaboration with David Perlmutter, who was then a professor at MIT. I was captivated by “RG” as a viable and interesting alternative to the then-prevailing theoretical paradigm, namely Chomskyan syntax, and ended up using it (with David’s help as a member of my committee) as the theoretical foundation for my dissertation on the historical syntax of Modern Greek.
Fast forward to 1986 and my first taste of conference organizing, the Second Biennial Conference on Relational Grammar and Grammatical Relations held at The Ohio State University; Paul was one of the keynote speakers (David Perlmutter was the other one). That conference led to my first editorial experience with a book for a major commercial publisher. It was decided at the conference to try to publish the papers as the third volume after Studies in Relational Grammar 1 (Perlmutter 1983) and Studies in Relational Grammar 2 (Perlmutter and Rosen 1984). The publisher of SRG 1 and SRG 2 was The University of Chicago Press, and the Press was interested so it was decided that as conference organizer, I would be an editor, along with—you guessed it—Paul, an experienced hand, as co-editor and thus as key mentor in my development as an editor.2 I have gone on to co-edit 11 other volumes with commercial publishers and it all started with Postal and Joseph 1990.
So Paul has played a key role in my career development, and though I am glad to be able to thank him publicly, as it were, in this preface, that is not the reason this book of his is included in this series. Rather, it appears here because, as its title indicates, it is a penetrating critique of the most basic assumptions underpinning the current prevailing syntactic theory. Moreover, it is empirical—an essential for the series—in an innovative way. Author Postal introduces alexical elements, a notion he first drew attention to in Postal 2004, and claims they are a type of linguistic element that is part of the resources speakers bring to their linguistic interactions with other speakers. As such, they deserve recognition in linguistic theory and thus provide empirical data that can be problematic for a theory.
I hope that you readers will find this latest example of Paul Postal’s research to be as stimulating now as I found his work to be 50+ years ago.
Brian D. Joseph
EALT Series Managing Editor
Columbus, Ohio USA
16 May 2025
References
Katz, Jerrold and Paul M. Postal. 1964. An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Perlmutter, David M., ed. 1983. Studies in Relational Grammar 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Perlmutter, David M. and Carol Rosen, eds. 1984. Studies in Relational Grammar 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Postal, Paul M. 1974. On Raising: One Rule of English Grammar and its Theoretical Implications. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Postal, Paul M. 2004. Skeptical linguistic essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Postal, Paul M. and Brian D. Joseph, eds. 1990. Studies in Relational Grammar 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
This hypothesis posited that syntactic transformations did not change meaning, so that the deep structure for a sentence encoded all relevant elements of meaning; sentences that differed in meaning, accordingly, had different deep structures. While it has been challenged over the years, it was instrumental in shaping much of syntactic and semantic theorizing at the time.
Prior to working on this volume, I had actually edited three issues of Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics (OSUWPL 26, 34, 35), one co-edited with Arnold Zwicky, to whom I also owe a debt of gratitude for helping me learn the editorial ropes. But dealing with a commercial publisher was a different experience altogether.