what a short book

[Wataru Nakamura]

Dear all,

> accepting this, one would also accept the same relationship between
> 
>   what a short book
>   how short a book
> 
> But there is a big problem with this derivation.
> 
> Re-obtaining the major results of Bresnan (1973) in LFG, and doing it better,
> is a major unmet challenge for the theory (so yes, we are basically
> `stumped', but so is everybody else, really;  the little factoid is
> maybe a bit of encouragement for a lexical analysis.

The recent exchanges reminds me of a paper by Eric Schiller and Barbara
Need (1993), who analyze the constructions at issue in terms of a mismatch
between syntax and semantics (cf. Sadock 1991):

    Syntax:     [[too nice] a theory]
    Semantics:  [a [too nice] theory]

    Syntax:     [such [a [nice theory]]]
    Semantics:  [a [such nice] theory]

    Syntax:     [what [a [short book]]]
    Semantics:  [a [what short] book]

This is proposed as an alternative to an inversion rule analysis
(e.g. Carlson 1977), accoring to which the sequence 'a such' is inverted
to 'such a'. Since I read Mohanan (1995), I have been curious to know how
this type of 'mismatch' analysis fits into the architecture of LFG


Schiller, Eric and Barbara Need (1993)  The liberation of minor categories
	CLS 28 (1), 484-498.



Wataru Nakamura