Filler-gap mismatches

[Detmar Meurers]

Dear Bob,

> Does anyone know of any HPSG work on situations where fill and gap do not
> match up as they should [...] ?

Here are a couple of other pointers/phenomena which might be relevant:

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1) Pollard and Sag (1994), p. 165, fn. 6 discusses:

(i)  * You can rely on that Kim will help you.
(ii)   That Kim will help you, you can rely on.

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2) Webelhuth (1992) "Principles and Parameters of Syntactic
   Saturation", chapter 3.

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3) Tilman Hoehle pointed out some constructions in German where
   the topicalized constituent cannot occur in its "base position":

A) VPs with extraposed relative clauses:

(iii) [Einen Hund fuettern, der Hunger hat,] wird jeder    duerfen.
       A     dog  feed      who hunger has   will everyone be-allowed-to

(iv) *Jeder wird [einen Hund fuettern, der Hunger hat,] duerfen.
      Ever. will  a     dog  feed      who hunger has   be-allowed-to

B) Split-NP phenomenon, if one wanted to analyze it as extraction
(which people have tried, but more promising analyses are available
such as e.g. Jonas Kuhn's in Meurers/Kiss "Constraint-based Approaches
to Germanic Syntax". CSLI. 2001):

(v)  [Ein Buch gelesen] hat er keines.
      a   book read     has he none

(vi) * Er hat keines [ein Buch gelesen].
       he has none    a   book read.

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4) In German, full VP complements of so-called coherent verbs (e.g.,
the modal verbs) can only occur when the VP complement is topicalized:

(vii)  [Eine Schalplatte kaufen] wird er sicher nicht mehr wollen.
        an   LP          buy     will he surely no    more want

(viii) * Er wird sicher [eine Schalplatte kaufen] nicht mehr wollen.
         he will surely  a    record      buy     no    more want

     (This order with the VP preceding the negation in the Mittelfeld
      is grammatical for optionally incoherent or incoherent verbs.)

Building on work on this phenomenon by Nerbonne, Hinrichs, Nakazawa,
and Pollard, Stefan Mueller and I presented analyses of this
phenomenon in which we assume that the requirement for a lexical
cluster is not transmitted non-locally (technically: LEX is an
attribute of synsem not of local objects).

Meurers (1999). German Partial-VP Topicalization Revisited. In
Webelhuth et al. "Lexical and Constructional Aspects of Linguistic
Explanation". CSLI Publications, 129-141. (published version of paper
presented in 1996).

Mueller (1996). Yet another Paper about Partial Verb Phrase Fronting
in German. In Proceedings of COLING 1996, 800-805.

Lieben Gruss,
Detmar

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Detmar Meurers                              Fax: Int + 614 292-8833
The Ohio State University                   Tel: Int + 641 292-0461
Department of Linguistics            E-Mail: dm at ling.ohio-state.edu
1712 Neil Avenue, Oxley Hall    Homepage:
Columbus OH 43210-1298, USA     http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~dm/