morphosyntax query

[Hans Uszkoreit]

Stefan,

Nothing against an ad hoc solution in the absence of a
more principled acount. However, why do you call your
feature +/-INFLECTED.

You could not say:

*der Geruch Holzes
 the  smell  wood
           [CASE gen]
"the smell of wood"

as opposed to

 der Geruch frischen   Holzes
 the  smell    fresh    wood
             [CASE gen][CASE gen]
"the smell of fresh wood"

The form "Holzes" is inflected and
unambiguously exhibits genitive case.

So what's really going on?


Best,

Hans


Stefan Mueller wrote:

> Hi,
>
> You have a similar situation with the genitive in German:
>
> die Berater  der    Praesidenten
> the advisors of.the presidents
>
> die Berater  kluger    Praesidenten
> the advisors of.smart  presidents
>
> * die Berater  Praesidenten
>   the advisors presidents
>
> The inflection can be marked by the determiner or adjective, but without
> anything the sentence is not processable.
>
> der Berater zweier Pr"asidenten
> the advisor two    presidents
>
> der Berater der zwei Praesidenten
> the advisor the two  presidents
>
> * der Berater zwei Pr"asidenten
>   the advisor two  presidents
>
> If you come up with a solution to such problems that is less ad hoc than
> a +/-INFLECTED feature, please let me know.
>
> Greetings
>
>         Stefan

--
________________________________________
Hans Uszkoreit
http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/~hansu/
Email: Uszkoreit at dfki.de
________________________________________
Personal email: Hans at Uszkoreit.net
Personal Homepage: http://hans.uszkoreit.net

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