COMP

[Helge Lødrup]

In a very interesting letter to the LFG list, Alsina and the Mohanans
claimed that it is impossible to treat the grammatical relation COMP in a
satisfactory way in current LFG, and they propose that all COMPs are
objects. Even if I agree with their first claim, I think that there are
cases in which the "ordinary working grammarian" would find it useful to
distinguish between an OBJ and a COMP.

=46irst, there are the well known differences between the syntactic
properties of complement clauses and NP objects in English, which are
described by Emonds 1970 and others.

Second, there are constructions in which it seems to be difficult to assume
that the complement clause is an object, for example extraposition,
adjective complementation and noun complementation. Cf. for example

It worries me that the earth is round
I am afraid that the wolf will come
the certainty that we should lose

Third, there is the cross-linguistic variation in the syntax of complement
clauses. Even if the syntactic properties of complement clauses in English
are different from those of NP objects, this is clearly not the case in all
languages. For example, in Icelandic the syntactic properties of complement
clauses are very similar to those of NP objects (Thrainsson 1979), and the
same is true of Norwegian (Lodrup 1991) and Chichewa (Bresnan 1995). A way
of describing this variation, proposed by Grimshaw 1982, would be to assume
that a complement clause can be an OBJ in languages like Icelandic, but
only a COMP in languages like English. (Cf. also Andrews 1982, Lodrup
1991.) Accepting this proposal, the following argument by Alsina and the
Mohanans is not relevant:

>The generalisation is that a non-subject non-oblique argument ( i.e., a
>[+o] ) is an OBJ or OBJ-th if it is an NP, and a COMP if it is an S or
>S-bar. This results in a redundancy; the same theoretical distinction is
>represented at two levels of representation, that between OBJ and COMP at
>f-structure and NP and S at c-structure. This duplication of information is
>undesirable in any theory.

I would of course not want to say that it is impossible to account for the
cases mentioned above without assuming a COMP. I only wanted to point out
that there are cases in which the distinction between OBJ and COMP seems to
be useful. If we want to keep it, we will have to revise current LFG theory
- especially LMT, as Alsina and the Mohanans point out. I am looking
forward to seeing ideas of how this could be done.

PS: The LFG colloquium in Grenoble was great! Takk for sist ('thanks for
the last time'), as we say in Norwegian. And special thanks to the
organizers.

Best, Helge


References:

Andrews, A.D. 1982 The representation of case in modern Icelandic. In J.
Bresnan (ed.) The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations.
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press., 427-503
Bresnan, J. 1995 Category mismatches. In A. Aakinlabi (ed.) Theoretical
Approaches to African Languages. Trenton NJ: African World Press. Pp.
19-46.
Emonds, J.E. 1970 Root and structure-preserving transformations.
Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Grimshaw, J. 1982 Subcategorization and grammatical relations. In A. Zaenen
(ed.) Subjects and other subjects. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University
Linguistics Club, 35-56.
Lodrup, Helge 1991b Clausal complements in English and Norwegian. Norsk
lingvistisk tidsskrift. 105-136. (Oslo: Novus.) [Please ask me to send it
to you, write to helge.lodrup at ilf.uio.no]
Thrainsson, H. 1979 On complementation in Icelandic. New York: Garland
Publishing.


----------------------------------------------------------
Professor Helge Lodrup
University of Oslo
Department of Linguistics
Pb 1102, Blindern
N-0317 Oslo, Norway

E-mail: helge.lodrup at ilf.uio.no         Phone +47 22 85 48 31