Learn English – “Such” as a pronoun and “Reduction Transformations”

grammarword-usage

I just ran into this in the novel "Pride and Prejudice"

-"Ah! you do not know what I suffer."
-"But I hope you will get over it, and live to see many young men of four thousand a year come into the neighbourhood.''
-“It will be no use to us if twenty such should come, since you will not visit them.''

  1. The occurrence of "such" here is interesting to me. Is it a pronoun here which is brought instead of "young men of four thousand a year"?
  2. What is the deep structure of the noun phrase of the if-clause? the surface structure is "twenty such". Is the deep structure "twenty young men who are of 4 thousand a year"?
  3. When a Reduction Transformation is possible which is better to be used? for example, is it better to say "a man who is of large fortune" or "a man of large fortune"? Any links elaborating on the Reduction Transformations in English would be truly appreciated. As far as I know, there are six RTs. But I need a trustworthy reference for my further studying.

Best Answer

  1. Such does indeed act as a pronoun, and its antecedent is indeed young men of four thousand a year.

  2. Anaphora—the co-referential relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent— does not to my mind imply that the antecedent is present in the ‘deep structure’ of the utterance in which the pronoun is employed. There may be grammars which represent a pronoun-in-use as a ‘reduction’ of its antecedent, taken to be ‘present’ in a governing ‘deep structure’. This sort of analysis seems to me to contradict the facts of utterance and interpretation, and to be in consequence of very little value to the users of language, however sophisticated. Moreover, it sets the linguist on a slippery slope toward a philosophical monism in which the ultimate ‘deep structure’ is the entire language—and possibly also an experienced universe taken to be coterminous if not indeed identical with the language.

  3. It is impossible to say that one or the other of these expressions is always preferable to the other, without regard to context; but it seems to me that of great wealth is not a ‘reduction’ but the ‘base’ form, and that the explicit relative who is of great wealth is an expansion of it which might be elicited in unusual circumstances.

I am not competent to address the further issues raised in your third question.

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