Argument or no argument ?

We will call such adjuncts instances of the X or no X construction It was suggested in the middle 1980s by Alexis Manaster-Ramer that well-formed instances of X or no X involve a string X of unbounded length preceding or no, with an exact copy following (for a brief allusion to it in print, see Manaster-Ramer 1986). This claim has received hardly any discussion at all in the subsequent literature. But if it were true, it would settle, in the negative, the question of whether English was context-free. It has been widely assumed over four decades that this questions has already been settled, but in fact all published arguments for the negative answer have been flawed. The early arguments from sentences containing respectively, for instance, are criticized in Daly (1974) and Pullum and Gazdar (1982) on empirical grounds, and were dealt a final decisive blow by Dalrymple and Kehler (1995), who showed that counterexamples of the sort Pullum and Gazdar adduced are well attested in available corpora. In other cases the controversy has remained open, with both data questions and mathematical disputes proving hard to settle. For example, the literature on the such that argument (Higginbotham 1984) remains inconclusive. Similar remarks could be made about the argument from comparative clause string inequality: linguistic data and mathematical basis alike turned out to be problematic, and ultimately the controversy stalled. Manaster-Ramer’s suggested argument, however, is particularly clean, and initially looks very convincing. We first present Manaster-Ramer’s argument as convincingly as we can, and then show that it is not convincing on empirical grounds. We also sketch an analysis of what is really going on in the X or no X construction. That analysis leads us to the conclusion that it does not involve syntactic reduplication. Two crucial empirical assumptions are needed to set up the version of Manaster-Ramer’s argument that is developed here (for which we take responsibility): that there are indefinitely many instances of the X or no X construction, and that they really involve string identity. The phrases flanking the words or no are of the sort we will call nominals, as in Huddleston and Pullum (2002). (They are called N in early X-bar theory, and under the DP hypothesis they are the maximal projection of N.) The crucial claim is that English contains unboundedly many nominals that can occur in the X or no X construction (a countable infinity of them under the usual view). Actual uses of the construction tend to be very short, limited to single nouns or very short fixed nominals. Daniel Radzinski pointed out to us that the ACL/DCI Wall Street Journal corpus appears to contain 16 occurrences of the construction in about 44 million words. The longest of them are phrases like Cold War or no Cold War. But there seems intuitively to be no reason why a phrase like string-identity-based non-contextfreeness argument or no string-identity-based non-context-freeness argument might not be