This paper presents a theory of the syntactic aspects of human sentence production. An important characteristic of unprepared speech is that overt pronunciation of a sentence can be initiated before the speaker has completely worked out the meaning content he/she is going to express in that sentence. Certain other properties of spontaneous speech, as derivable from speech errors, hesitations, repairs and language pathology, are accounted for as well. The psychological plausibility thus gained by the grammar appears compatible with a satisfactory level of linguistic plausibility in that sentences receive structural descriptions similar to those generated by certain interpretive versions of Transformational Grammar. More importantly, an explanation for the existence of configurational conditions on transformations and other linguistic rules is proposed.
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