ARG-ST as a head feature

[Carl Pollard]

Hi folks,

Berthold says:

>
But where shall it go? The likeness restriction on constituent
coordination most probably not only involves identity of major category
plus head feature such as CASE or VFORM,[*]  it also requires identity
of
degree of saturation. To express this in a most general fashion, one
need
only coindex the SS|LOC|CAT  of the conjuncts with the mother and
everything is fine. If ARG-ST is embedded somewhere under CAT (quite
likely), one will lose exactly this generalisation.
(In essence, this was Stefan Müller's line of argumentation.)
CONT may be an option, at least you'll get some sort of percolation for
free. But with modifiers,
you probably still wouldn't get the desired results, unless you assume
that modifiers attract the ARG-ST value of the head.

Yet another point: what value will the ARG-ST of the mother-node have,
in
coordinated structures? Unification won't work, maybe
concatenation? But that'll give rise to strange implications concerning
binding. If, however, BT could only safely apply to word-level ARG-STs,
that'd be even more of an argument against percolation, wouldn't it.

Ooops, forgot, you could of course (partially) embed them à la Manning
and
Sag. But to me, that's quite an exotic data structure anyway:
list(synsem
v list(synsem)). Some ARG-STs already come in lexically nested (see
Manning & Sag), so that'll give you list(synsem v list(synsem) v
list(list(synsem))), wouldn't it?

Also, if something percolates up the head line, but does not do that in
the way other features do (e.g. HFP or Ivan's version of the SIP),
there's
definitely something fishy about it, don't you think? Plus the locality
considerations...
>>

Berthold has raised a very important obstacle to the notion that
ARG-ST goes up head paths, which up till now I subscribed to.
Theories of coordination I am familiar with require some kind
operation on the head values of the coordinate daughters and some
other operation on the corresponding valence (SUBJ, COMPS, SPR)
feature values, which requires that for each valence feature the
corresponding value lists be of the same length and the operation be
taken componentwise. But this does not extend in an obvious way ARG-ST
if it can appear on phrases, since, e.g. in general two VPs phrases
can be coordinated whose head verbs have ARG-STs of different
lengths. This problem (but not the locality issue) is enough to make
me give up on the idea of ARG-ST going up head paths.

Berthold went on to say:

>
[*] PP coordination may be a counter-argument (differing PFORM values).
>>

Counterargument to what?

>
However, as Jesse Tseng has suggested, semantically non-vacuous
prepositions will better be selected via CONT anyway.
>>

That sounds right.

>
In the case of
prepositional objects, however, I strongly doubt that these can be
conjoined at all.
>>

How about:

  I voted for Proposition A and against Proposition B?

Carl