Institute of Contemporary Arts

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda

this space to write a few words about the background research involved in making our show at Isabella Bortolozzi gallery in 2006, and to explain what I call the mechanics of the piece: how it was supposed to function in that particular context. Since the piece was about the relation of the supporting texts that describe artworks to the artworks themselves - in other words, how much meaning could be applied to the work from the outside, the idea of a reference established by a supporting text, or the text's role in a claim to legitimate discourse - we withheld any information outside of the gallery press release, which we considered to be an important part of the work.

It was less a technique or theory than the sensibility of a group of people that inspired our work. This sensibility, at once critical and irreverent, was found in papers associated with a linguistic theory called generative semantics. Generative semantics is almost always talked about in the past tense, sometimes even nostalgically, because many consider it to be a failed research program, obsolete or unemployable in present-day linguistic studies. I would say generative semantics hasn't been so much discredited as absorbed into a field that has been completely rearranged or restructured, partly because of its own impact on that field.

The people who proposed the generative semantics model saw it as an improvement to transformational grammar; they were one-time disciples turned dissidents. One can safely say that the proponents of generative semantics were very much aware of their role as separatists, or at least of their oppositional position to the dominant mainstream of Chomsky's theory, a role which jibed well with the time in which they developed their ideas, The Sixties. As an oppositional theory it took all the trappings of the counterculture of the period, embracing and employing a timely rhetoric, style and strategy that delighted in the madcap, especially sex, drugs, the Rolling Stones, protesting the war in Vietnam, scatology, and profanity. They circulated their ideas in underground papers, mimeographed them and passed them around.

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A SELECTIONAL RESTRICTION INVOLVING PRONOUN CHOICE

YUCK FOO

South Hanoi Institute of Technology

This note is concerned with a counterexample to the outrageous claim made by the bourgeois imperialist linguist McCawley that "there is no verb in English which allows for its subject just those noun phrases which may pronominalize to SHE, namely noun phrases denoting women, ships, and countries... selectional restrictions are definable solely in terms of properties of semantic representation. Consider the idiomatic sense of "shove X up Y's ass". As is well known, Y must be the coreferentail to the indirect object of a deleted performative verb):

(1) Shove it up your/*my ass

(2) He told me to shove it up my/*your ass.

For certain speakers, X may not be a 'full' noun phrase in surface structure:

(3) Shove your foreign policy up your ass, you Yankee imperialist.

but all speakers appear to allow X to be an anaphoric pronoun:

(4) Take your foreign policy and shove it up your ass, you Yankee imperialist.

The pronoun may be IT but may not be HE or SHE:

(5) Nixon, you imperialist butcher, take your lunatic Secretary of Defense and shove him up your ass.

(6) Nixon, you imperialist butcher, take your brainless daughter and shover her up your ass.

(7) Rockefeller, you robber baron, take your 80-foot yacht and shove it/her up your ass.

Certain informants have reported that they find THEM acceptable but only when its antecedent is something whose singular would pronominalize to it rather than to HE or SHE:

(8) Nixon, you imperialist butcher, take your bourgeois lackeys in Taiwan and shove them up your ass.

(9) Nixon, you oppressor of the masses, take your anti-crime bills and shove them up your ass.

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the section between ******** & ******** as the 'paper', as it is in Starship: