Filler-gap mismatches

[Julia de Caradeuc Bernd]

> I believe HPSG practicioners tend to be mystified by the LFG notion
> `functional', since the attributes that appear in an f-structure
> seem to be a mix of syntax-semantics interface (PRED), valence
> (SUBJ, OBJ, etc.) and morphosyntax (CASE, PFORM, etc.)
> What do you take to be the sense of `functional' that unites
> these things? What do (say) SUBJ and (say) PFORM have in common
> that makes them be grouped in the same module?

There's an attempt to clarify this in Andrews and Manning (1999),
where f-structure (and other info) is decomposed into a whole series
of functional projections of different kinds that may (or may not) be
shared between nodes.  The information usually stuffed altogether in
f-structure is broken down into a projection containing the semantic
(syntactico-semantic?) PREDicate and its arguments, a projection
containing grammatical functions (valence), and a "morphosyntactic"
projection containing features such as TENSE and CASE.  (There's also
a category projection and a bar-level projection; don't know about
PFORM.)  The details of what goes in what projection are arguable, but
the basic intuition is that standard LFG f-structure could be seen as
a shorthand for several types of thing.

-Julia