stumped? Or just can't be bothered?!

[Arnold D J]

Dear Paul,

	"What a short book!"

As you no doubt intend, your last message about the lack of an answer
to the question "how would you analyze this in LFG?" has prompted at
least one person to repy. I'm sure the correct answer is, as you
suggest, that the readers of the list are stumped, in the sense that
none of them has an answer to hand. I don't think anyone has presented
an analyis of this construction in LFG.

But there a few things one can say: 

1. I would not say this is a sentence: a. it is verbless (obviously)
and b. it does not express a proposition; with time, one could find
other reasons, no doubt. I would have thought it was an NP.

2. If it is an NP, the structure is obvious, except for the "What" at
the front. This may relate to the phenomenon, studied by
various people (including Joan Bresnan), whereby certain kinds of nominal
modifier not only precede the noun, they also precede the determiner. 
So we have:

	How big a mess
	Too big a mess (to clear up)
	So  big a mess (that we could not clear it up)
	How big a confusing mess
	Too big a confusing mess (to clear up)
	
(following work of Berman's in the '70s (her PhD thesis), the
construction is often called the "big mess" construction).

I assume that:

	What a mess

(and hence your example) is basically the same as this. I don't know
any satisfactory treatment of this construction anywhere, and as I say
I don't think anyone has looked at it in an LFG context. 

However, as regards the f-structure, the "What" is, like the other
premodifiers, presumably just an adjunct, i.e. a member of the ADJunct
set. So the f-structure is similar to that of "a big mess", or "a mess
in the kitchen" and so on. This leaves all the interesting questions
unanswered, of course.

Best wishes,
Doug

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Doug Arnold,  		     	   doug at essex.ac.uk
Dept. of Language & Linguistics,   http://clwww.essex.ac.uk/~doug
University of Essex,	     	   
Wivenhoe Park,		     	   Tel: +44 1206 872084 (direct)
Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK.     	   Fax: +44 1206 872085
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