ARG-ST as a head feature

[Adam Przepiorkowski]

On coordination and ARG-ST on phrases:

Carl Pollard writes:
 > 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.)
 > >>
 >
 > 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.

The presupposition in this discussion seems to be that head features of
coordinated phrases should be "the same".  But it is clear that this cannot
be the case -- cases of coordination of unlike categories have been
discussed profusely: even the simplest examples like "Kim is a Republican
and proud of it" cannot be so analysed, unless one plays with the notion of
"sameness of categories" (e.g., a la Sag et al.'s 1985 NLLT paper).  So I
don't see an argument (here) against ARG-ST as a head value -- in general,
head values of coordinated daughters cannot be expected to be equal anyway.

Of course, if ARG-ST were present on phrases, it wouldn't behave like
valence features in the sense that we wouldn't expect both coordinated
daughters to have the same ARG-ST.  But why would we want ARG-ST to behave
like valence features anyway?  ARG-ST has always had a rather different
ontological status than valence features.

Best,

	Adam P.

--
           ,
ADAM PRZEPIORKOWSKI
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