belated response on pleonastics

[Steven Schaufele]

I'm very sorry that my current (non-academic) employment situation makes 
it so difficult for me to participate in public discussions on LINGUIST, 
etc. as often as i would like with the thoughtfulness they deserve, espe- 
cially when they concern research questions of interest to me.  In parti- 
cular, i have to apologize that it has taken me a whole month to respond 
to comments made by Dick Hudson, Mary Dalrymple, and Joan Bresnan on the 
subject of pleonastic subjects.  I also very much regret that it has so 
far proved unfeasible for me to track down the Halvorsen paper (LI 14: 
567-615) to which Mary made reference.

However, i don't want anybody to suppose that my unavoidable delay in 
responding implies any concession on my part!  In point of fact, the 
argument that pleonastic subjects of weather verbs must be represented in 
f-structure i find particularly unconvincing.  Nicolas Ruwet (1991, caps. 
3-4) has already presented extensive, thought-provoking, and (to me) con- 
vincing arguments that such pleonastic subjects (in those languages which 
have them) are (1) devoid of semantic content and (2), within an REST 
framework, bear no theta-role -- i.e., the typical weather verb has no 
theta-role to assign.  That being the case, only the Extended Projection 
Principle licenses the presence of such pleonastic subjects in languages 
like English and French.  Within a framework like LFG, they would presuma- 
bly need to be licensed by a general principle that requires subjects 
even when they're not called for by the verb's lexical entry, possibly by 
means of a `default subject assignment' on which more below.  (For vari- 
ant views on this issue, cf. Bresnan & Kanerva 1989, Bresnan & Zaenen 
1990, and Mohanan 1990.  I, personally, have tended to oppose suggestions 
that an across-the-board requirement for subjects is a linguistic univer- 
sal, but i am perfectly happy to assume that such a requirement exists in 
some languages; after all, it manifestly exists in English and French.)

Furthermore, Ruwet demonstrates that the grammars of some languages (e.g. 
French), even when they require pleonastic subjects in the absence of 
`real' ones, make a clear grammatical distinction between the pleonastic 
subjects of weather verbs and the more `normal' subjects of more `normal' 
verbs.  (In fact, his arguments suggest that weather verbs are at one end 
of a continuum, with archetypal verbs at or near the other end and verbs 
like `seem', `appear', etc. somewhere in the middle, with regard to the 
character of their subjects.)

That the pleonastic subjects of weather verbs participate in passiviza- 
tion as in (1b) and are obligatory even in non-finite contexts as in (2), 
as pointed out by Hudson, are not probative, in my judgment, at least 
within an LFG framework.  Part of the strength (or at least appeal) of 
LFG's approach, after all, is that it makes feasible the `lexicalization' 
of most of what used to be done syntactically in the hypothetical `trans- 
formational component'.  Thus, `passivization' is not (essentially) a 
`relation-changing' operation, converting an object (whether `raised' 
from a subordinate subject or not) to a subject, but a licensing of an 
alternative lexical entry of a verb; the difference in mapping schemata 
between predicate-argument structure and GF is merely one manifestation 
of the difference between two related lexical entries.

(1)	a. We expected it to rain.
	b. It was expected to rain.

(2)	a. *(Its) raining during the picnic was a nuisance.
	b. *(For it) to rain in mid-summer is quite normal in London.

Thus, we have a lexical entry for `rain' that may (at most) make the 
stipulation in (3), and a lexical entry for `expect' that stipulates that 
it takes a clausal complement, and furthermore, should that complement be 
non-finite, carries the stipulation in (4); `Passivization' licenses an 
alternative lexical entry for `expect' with the stipulation in (5).  But 
in a sentence like (1b), that SUBJ is represented only by constraint (3) 
in the lexical entry for the verb `rain'; there is no reason for it to be 
overtly represented in f-structure.

(3)	SUBJ =(c) `it'
(4)	OBJ =(c) SCOMP(-fin) SUBJ
(5)	SUBJ =(c) SCOMP(-fin) SUBJ

The obligatoriness of overt subjects in sentences like those in (2), i 
think, ought to be accountable in terms of a `default' subject specifica- 
tion for the grammar of the language in question.  I would even go so far 
as to entertain the possibility that such a default -- defined as such 
for the grammar as a whole but not requiring overt specification in the 
f-structure of any particular sentence -- might be able to cover adequate- 
ly such phenomena as the agreement of tags, such as the example Joan Bres- 
nan mentioned to me reproduced here as (6).  However, the nature of such 
a default specification would have to vary from language to language, 
even among those languages that are not, in the `traditional' sense, 
`pro-drop' or `null-subject'; the translation equivalents of (2) into 
French (with infinitives, as opposed to full-fledged subordinate clauses) 
are quite grammatical without overt subjects for the weather verbs; cf. (7).

(6)	It's obvious that X, isn't it?

(7)	a. Pleuvoir pendant le pique-nique, c''etait emb^etant.
	b. Pleuvoir en mi-'et'e en Londres, c'est absolument normale.

Joan went on to note, however, that even if such pleonastic elements are 
represented in f-structure, they must be `overrulable' or `skipable' under 
circumstances of anaphoric control (if i'm not mistaken, it was something 
like this issue that raised the original question, from J.S. Wu), witness 
the ability of `Mary' to prompt the choice of an anaphoric resumptive, in 
spite of the intervening `it', in (8a) vs. the increasing difficulty in 
(8b-c). (Acceptability judgments reported here are presumably Joan's; i 
agree with the comparative ranking, but i'm not sure i would admit (8c) 
at all.)

(8)	a. Mary thought that it was obvious that pictures of herself 
	   would be on sale.
	b. ?Mary thought that it was obvious to everyone that pictures of
	   herself would be on sale.
	c. ??Mary thought that everybody knew that pictures of herself
	   would be on sale.

All of this raises a question i have some general interest in: the syntax 
of grammatical elements that have little or no semantic (and/or pragmatic) 
content.  I'm not very strong in this area, and would like to see some 
serious discussion of the question.

REFERENCES

Bresnan, Joan, & Jonni M. Kanerva.  1989.  `Locative Inversion in 
Chichewa: a Case Study of Factorization in Grammar' Linguistic Inquiry 
20:1-50.

Bresnan, Joan, & Annie Zaenen.  1990.  `Deep Unaccusativity in LFG' 
Katarzyna, Patrick Farrell, & Errapel Mejias-Bikandi (eds.) Grammatical 
Relations: a Cross-Theoretical Perspective.  Stanford: CSLI, pp. 45-57.

Mohanan, Tara.  1990.  Arguments in Hindi.  Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford 
University.

Ruwet, Nicolas.  1991.  Syntax and Human Experience (John Goldsmith, tr) 
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Best,
Steven
---------------------
Dr. Steven Schaufele
712 West Washington
Urbana, IL  61801
217-344-8240
fcosws at prairienet.org

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