forwarded from Ron Kaplan Re: Filler-gap mismatches

[Ivan A. Sag]

Hi Ron,

You wrote:

>   Kaplan and Zaenen (1989) introduced  functional uncertainty as a
> better way of characterizing long-distance dependencies, purely in
> functional terms and without making use of traces at all (what has now
> become a common approach outside of the transformational tradition).
> That paper also discusses the "think of " examples, actually in slightly
> more detail and with a little more review of the literature on this
> topic.  We claimed that the observed patterns follow from two facts:
> COMP cannot be at the bottom of an English uncertainty and English
> phrase-structure does not allow for S's inside PP's.

A question I've always had about this proposal was this: what independent
evidence is there for moving the selectional properties of prepositions into
the phrase structure rules in LFG. We know (see, e.g. Jackendoff 73 in the
Halle Festschrift) that English prepositions show various complementation
patterns:

NP complement: in the box, into the room, without a trace, ...
PP complement: out into the garden, from under the bush, *into toward the
               garden, ...
zero complement: around, in, out, *into, *toward, ...

These seem like variations in complement selection that should be lexicalized,
that is they seem analogous to variations in verb complementation. So an HPSG
analysis would in all likelihood use a single head-complement construction
(probably the same one used for other parts of speech,...) and the different
prepositions would have different lexically encoded selections. Wouldn't this
be a natural LFG analysis as well? Is there some justification for treating
these differently?

And then there's Joe Emonds' analysis of after, before, since, etc.
as prepositions that take S complements. That would fit nicely into
this kind of lexicalized analysis:

before/after you leave, since they were tired

                        PP
                       /  \
                      P    S

This seems inconsistent with an analysis that tries to make predictions based
on the assumption that English phrase structure doesn't allow Ss inside
PPs. Or would you rely on an S/CP difference?  Or would you deny Emonds's
analysis?

I suppose some of these issues boil down to the fundamental question of
whether a grammatical theory should distinguish c-structure with monadic
categories (although some LFG work -- e.g. by Bresnan, Sells -- uses feature
structures for c-structure categories as well) from f-structure with feature
structure categories. HPSG would answer this negatively, saying that there
are many kinds of (feature) structure categories, each with their own
properties, but no fundamental distinction between coarse-grained c-structure
categories (NP vs. PP vs. A, etc.) and the various kinds of f-structure.

Is it possible for us to come to some kind of common understanding of these
issues?

Best,
Ivan