Answer to Roger and Shuichi (was: Trees, pheno, tectogrammar)

[S. Yatabe]

Tibor,

You write:

>With respect to Shuichi's email, I would like to raise attention to the
>following type of example found in German (and presumably other languages
>like Korean and Japanese, according to Hoji (1986)):
>
>(3) QP_1 QP_2 V
>(4) QP_2 QP_1 V
>
>In (3) and (4), QP designates a quantificational NP and 1 and 2 indicate an
>ordering of the quantifiers according to some hierarchy (let's assume
>obliqueness, so that 1 is IndObj and 2 is DObj). The funny thing is that (3)
>is in fact not ambiguous, but (4) is, allowing both a reading of QP_2 > QP_1
>and vice versa. The question is: How do you derive the second reading in (4)
>if interpretation is read off phenostructure?
>A detailed discussion of these cases in terms of a conservative HPSG
>analysis referring to ARG-ST is found in my contribution in Meurers/Kiss
>(2001).

I've never believed that short-distance scrambling is a phenogrammatical
operation;  unlike long-distance scrambling of the Japanese variety,
short-distance scrambling in languages like German and Japanese has
always seemed to me to be a tectogrammatical operation.

Besides, the claim that I make in my LNR paper is not really that
semantic interpretation cannot make reference to tectogrammatical
structure (i.e. things outside order domains) at all, but rather
that semantic composition takes place when domain objects are compacted
to form a larger domain object (as opposed to when syntactic constituents
are merged to form a larger syntactic constituent).

So the above facts do not necessarily pose a problem for the kind of
theory I have advocated, although I'm not completely sure at the moment
whether the analysis you propose in the above paper can be faithfully
and straightforwardly reproduced in this theoretical setup.

Shuichi