Filler-gap mismatches

[Yehuda N. Falk]

One last post (I think) before I return to the comfort of lurking mode.
Ivan raised a lot of interesting questions about the LFG understanding of
the concept "function" (or at least my understanding of the LFG concept
"function" :) ), which show, not surprisingly, that what is obvious to one
person is not to another. For example, it is obvious to me why OBJ is a
functional concept while NP is not, and it is obvious to Ivan that HPSG's
approach to modularity is not that different from LFG's. (That is also why,
although it is obvious to us that they are on the wrong track, there are
lots of people out there doing GB and Minimalism.) I actually think that
the "functional" side of LFG is underexplored, and my current research on
subjecthood (some of which I presented at Berkeley last year) is aimed at
pushing the notion of function.

One question of Ivan's that I did want to say something about is the following:

> > constituents or f-structure units. There also may be mismatches between
> > c-structure features and f-structure features. For example, in languages
> > with differential object marking we might want to say that "unmarked"
> > objects are Caseless in c-structure and have the feature [CASE ACC] in
> > f-structure.
>
>This seems to imply that there are two CASE features: one in c-structure;
>one in f-structure. Is that really what you mean?

Well, yes and no. Note I didn't say "feature" in referring to c-structure.
If we take a (modified) X-bar view of c-structure, which is one possible
approach in LFG (discussed both in Bresnan 2001 and Falk in press),
categories are decomposable into features; so c-structure has features of
some sort. Whether morphosyntactic features like Case are part of the
c-structure feature system is, I think, an open question. So there may be a
feature "Case" in c-structure, but I wasn't saying that.

What I had in mind is an idea which has crept up from time to time, from
Fillmore's 1968 "The Case for Case" to some GB work such as Bittner and
Hale's 1997 LI articles about Case to some work in LFG such as a paper by
Butt and King: Case is (at least in some languages) a functional category.
Under such a view, a "Case marked" nominal is a KP rather than NP or DP.
Butt and King argue for this analysis of Hindi, for example. In languages
like Hindi (or Hebrew or Japanese), where Case is expressed by a separate
particle which has headlike properties, this analysis is straightforward.
In languages with affixational Case, it is possible that Case-marked nouns
belong to the category K, just as in some languages (under what has become
the standard LFG analysis) finite verbs belong to the category I; I don't
know of any arguments that have been made (yet) for such an analysis in any
language, but the possibility exists. So the presence of the category K
would be "having Case" in c-structure.

It is possible for a nominal to not be a KP but to have the f-structure
feature CASE; i.e to be Caseless at c-structure but Caseful at f-structure.
These may have interesting effects. So in a language where verbs agree with
NP but not KP, these would trigger verb agreement. On the other hand, there
may be other kinds of phenomena, such as Case marking on a modifying
adjective, in which they behave as if they *do* have Case.

I think this is typical of the way LFG views the relationship between
levels. There is redundancy and there is imperfect correspondence. (I think
this also answers Ivan's question of why I referred to the PRED feature as
being like the "head" of an f-structure: I *did* put the word "head" in
scare quotes, but the idea remains that head-like behavior is found
throughout the grammar but c-structure X-bar-theoretic head, f-structure
"head", semantic "head", etc., need not coincide.) I have probably already
gone too far out on a limb in talking about HPSG, so I will not make any
comparison here with how HPSG views these things.

Regards,
Yehuda


                            Yehuda N. Falk
       Department of English, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
                     Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel
                        msyfalk at mscc.huji.ac.il
      Personal Web Site    http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msyfalk/
     Departmental Web Site    http://atar.mscc.huji.ac.il/~english/

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