We examine an argument for the non-context-freeness of English that has received virtually no discussion in the literature.
It is based on adjuncts of the form ‘X or no X’, where X is a nominal. The construction has been held to exemplify unbounded
syntactic reduplication. We argue that although the argument can be made in a mathematically valid form, its empirical basis
is not claimed unbounded syntactic identity between nominals does not always hold in attested cases, and second, an understanding
of the semantics of the construction removes the necessity of making reference to any syntactic reduplication.
Keywords Formal language theory - Context-freeness - Syntax - Reduplication - English - Computational linguistics - Linguistic engineering - Semantics - Corpus linguistics - Conventional implicature - Expressive epithets
The first author’s interest in this topic was sparked many years ago, when Robert Berwick brought to his attention the observations
of Alexis Manaster-Ramer. Gerald Gazdar, Uwe Mönnich, James MoRogers, Stuart Shieber and Alia Sperling have supplied useful
ideas in conversation and in comments on an earlier draft. Versions of this paper were presented at MIT in May 2005 and at
University College London in September 2005, and the members of both audiences are thanked for their valuable discussion.
The work of Pullum on this paper was partially supported by a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard
University.