Syntactic Structures as Pragmatic Options

One of the fundamental assumptions of formal linguistics is that the relations between sentence types can be expressed derivationally. This assumption is called into question with reference to the derived intransitive construction in English and certain subjectivization constructions in Xhosa where no such derivational relation with a base structure is possible. It is then argued that these structures as well as the structures between which more transparent relations are reputed to exist, should be accounted for in terms of nonformal cognitive notions such as those proposed in schema theory.