Answer to Roger and Shuichi (was: Trees, pheno, tectogrammar)

[Tibor Kiss]

Dear Roger, dear Shuichi,

I owe you an answer.  First Roger, then Shuichi.

Roger said:

> Hi Tibor (and others),
> ...
> the phenogrammatical realization of NP argument
> ordering is semantically potent, but the phenogrammatical realization
> of relative clause position (in situ vs. extraposed) is not.

This is what I am arguing in the paper (pp. 33-39, from web version): It's
the relative ordering of arguments and not the question whether a relative
clause is extraposed that leads to ungrammaticality w.r.t. variable binding.

However, I am quite sure that you would agree that phenogrammatical analyses
of scrambling would not provide a tecto-grammatical (and hence:
interpretational) difference between the grammatical and the ungrammatical
case.

Since you have alluded to a possible straw man in your email, let me try to
make clear against which position I am arguing. If I remember correctly,
Dowty's initial paper contains _minimalist_ in his title, and he is quite
explicit in claiming that tectogrammatical combination and phenogrammatical
reordering can be separated *and* are not mediated by syntax. Andreas Kathol
has claimed that both topicalization and extraposition are phenogrammatical
operations. Finally, Mike Reape has claimed that scrambling is to be
analyzed as phenogrammatical.

If I understood and remembered their proposals correctly, neither Dowty nor
Kathol or Reape has claimed that there is a mediating syntactic component
which records and transmits phenogrammatical information to tectogrammar and
vice versa. If somebody assumed that there *is* indeed a mediating syntactic
component, I would argue that such a component is what other people assume
under syntax proper and hence that these so-called minimalist approaches are
in fact not really minimalist (i.e. they are not parsimonious).

To sum up: Conceptually, the position I am attacking assumes phenogrammar,
tectogrammar and no mediation. Empirically, it assumes that topicalization,
extraposition, and scrambling are phenogrammatical operations. If there is a
straw man involved, please feel free to inform me. Assuming that there is
none, let me present a final empirical argument against linearization-based
approaches from my paper _Semantic Constraints_ (p. 31, from web version):

If these operations do not play a role at tectogrammar, what makes (1)
ungrammatical while (2) is fine, given that the tectostructure of both
examples is identical?

(1) *Etwas     zugeflüstert, der dort  steht, hat sie dem Mann.
     Something whispered-to  who there stands has she the man
(2) Sie hat dem Mann etwas     zugeflüstert, der dort steht.
    She has the man  something whispered-to  who there stands

Also, I would like to mention the discussion in Culicover/Rochemont
(1990:36ff, particularly fn30).

With respect to Shuichi's email, I would like to raise attention to the
following type of example found in German (and presumably other languages
like Korean and Japanese, according to Hoji (1986)):

(3) QP_1 QP_2 V
(4) QP_2 QP_1 V

In (3) and (4), QP designates a quantificational NP and 1 and 2 indicate an
ordering of the quantifiers according to some hierarchy (let's assume
obliqueness, so that 1 is IndObj and 2 is DObj). The funny thing is that (3)
is in fact not ambiguous, but (4) is, allowing both a reading of QP_2 > QP_1
and vice versa. The question is: How do you derive the second reading in (4)
if interpretation is read off phenostructure?
A detailed discussion of these cases in terms of a conservative HPSG
analysis referring to ARG-ST is found in my contribution in Meurers/Kiss
(2001).

Best

Tibor