what a short book

[Paul KAY]

I can't speak for LFG, of course, or properly even *in* LFG, but I don't 
think

(1)	What a short book!

has anything essential to do with modification of any kind.  
We're going to have to account anyway for

(2)	What a fiasco!
	What courage!

There are also sentences like

(3)	What a fiasco that was!
	What courage you displayed!
	What big teeth you have, Grandma'.

It seems to me that an  initial hypothesis might be  that sentences like 
(1-2) are elipted v ersions of sentences like (3).  This of course would 
mean that they are sentences, as was originally suggested and then 
disagreed with. The inerpretation of expressions like (1-2) seems to 
support both the elipsis hypothesis and teh claim someone made (and 
someone else rejected, and then, I think, a 3rd person argued for) that 
expressions like (1-2) do express a proposition.

It seems that in the construction licensing (3) we have an extracted
WHAT+NP constituent (which *might* be a NP, but anyway WHAT+NP is its
internal structure) and a construal in which the NP is interpreted as if
it hadn't left home adn some kind of surprise or intense reaction to the
resulting proposition is imputed to the speaker.  The construction
licensing (1-2) appears to be parasitic on the one licensing (3), simly
adding to it that everything but the WHAT+NP constituent can be left
unspoken under conditions of recoverability from context. 

I know I haven't spoken to teh issue of how this should be represen ted in
LFG (or any other framework, including Construction Grammar), and so may
have missed the point for many readers of this list.  But it seemed to me
that perhaps not all those following this discussion were fully aware
of what I take to be some relevant low-level facts. 

pk

On Sat, 22 Jun 1996, Avery Andrews wrote:

> 
> Thinking about this I noticed something; Bresnan (1973, section 1.5)
> derives:
> 
>   such a short book
> 
> from
> 
>   so short a book
> 
> accepting this, one would also accept the same relationship between
> 
>   what a short book
>   how short a book
> 
> But there is a big problem with this derivation.
> 
> Which is that the what a/such a constructions apply perfectly happily
> to NPs with multiple adjectival modification:
> 
> (1)  what/such a greedy, unscrupulous property-developer
> 
> But this doesn't work for the supposed source:
> 
> (2)   so/how greedy a property-developer 
>       so/how unscrupulous a property-developer
>      *so/how greedy an unscrupulous property-developer
>      *so/how greedy, unscrupulous a property-developer
> 
> In (1), there seems to be degree-modification that manages to apply
> in paralell to both of the prenominal adjectives; whereas the construction
> in (2) seems to rule out any kind of prenominal modification of the nominal
> although postnominal modification is sometimes OK:
> 
>  (3)  so/how awful a picture of Mary
>     ??how stunning a painting by Turner    
>       I have rarely read so impressive a novel by a first-time author
> 
> Re-obtaining the major results of Bresnan (1973) in LFG, and doing it better,
> is a major unmet challenge for the theory (so yes, we are basically
> `stumped', but so is everybody else, really;  the little factoid is
> maybe a bit of encouragement for a lexical analysis.
> 
>   Avery.Andrews at anu.edu.au
> 
> 
>