Filler-gap mismatches

[Carl Pollard]

Hi Ron,

>
> 5)a. Kim didn't think of the possible nasty consequences, or that
>      he might be wrong.
>
>   b. *Kim didn't think of that he might be wrong, or the possible
nasty
>      consequences.

> 6)a. Before you do that, please think of the possible consequences
>      and that you might be wrong.
>
>   b. *Before you do that,  please think of that you might be wrong
>      and the possible consequences

This pattern is pretty easy to explain, given the way coordination is
set up in LFG (e.g. Kaplan & Maxwell, 1988, reprinted in Dalrymple et al
1995, from CSLI).  The only categorial matching is defined by a general
c-structure rule schema that requires, for example, that the category of
only the left-most conjunct be identical to the category of the
coordination as a whole, so the NP object of "of" can be realized as the
sequence
	NP and/or S
but not
	S and/or NP
>>

Did I misunderstand what you meant? What you said seemed to imply that
the second conjunct of a complement isn't subject to any categorial
restrictions at all from the head that governs the complement.

>
I haven't thought about  7), and it doesn't strike me as particularly
good.

> 7) ?Sandy could think of only that he might be wrong, and not of
>    what the actual consequences might be if he were right.
>>

Try replacing THINK OF with TALK ABOUT?

>
If this is supposed to be acceptable, an obvious account would be to say
that "only + S" is  some sort of NP.  These kinds of cases seem to
relate to the squishiness of categories (ala an old Haj Ross paper,
maybe others).  "Whether" seems to make clauses even more nouny than
"only", and that is probably what we would say about 8):

8) The whole question of whether Dana is a gunrunner never came up.

An argument from somewhere in the literature (I talked to Annie about
this and we couldn't remember where this kind of thing was discussed)
involves the contrasts:

9a)  That the Earth is flat is obvious.
 b)  *Is that the Earth is flat obvious?
 c)   Is the fact that the earth is flat obvious?

10a)  Whether John left isn't clear.
  b)    Is whether John left clear?

The contrast in (10) suggests that the subject position in an inverted
sentence requires a true NP, and that-clauses don't qualify.  But (11)
shows that a "whether-clause seems perfectly OK, and thus that a
whether-clause is more nouny than a that-clause, maybe is in fact an NP.
 In other words, whatever explains the acceptable of 10b) would explain
the acceptability of 8).
>>

This account seems based on a conception of category where the
category of an expression is determined externally (by what
environments it can occur in) rather than internally (what its
internal structure is). So then, on that conception, are the verbal
gerund DELIBERATELY SLAUGHTERING RARE WARBLERS and the PP UNDER THE
BED actually NPs in


UNDER THE BED sure beats the commodities market if liquidity is what
matters to you.

I prefer UNDER THE BED to under the dresser.

I have always thought of UNDER THE BED as a stupid place to store
the good crystal

DELIBERATELY SLAUGHTERING RARE WARBLERS sure beats the commodities
market if irrational exuberance is what matters to you.

I prefer DELIBERATELY SLAUGHTERING RARE WARBLERS to spectator sports.

I have always thought of DELIBERATELY SLAUGHTERING RARE WARBLERS as
an efficient way to offend liberals and other losers.

If so, this is a quite different conception of syntactic category
from the one that has been used in most HPSG work that I'm familiar
with, a difference that goes beyond the matter of which features, if
any,  are part of the syntactic category (e.g. case,  verb form,
and syntactic selection of valents in HPSG but not LFG).

Carl