Those adjectives

[LFG List]

>I may get flamed for suggesting this,

Can't resist, Mark!

>but I think that most modern
>linguistic theories, LFG included, have very little to say about
>argument structure except in verbal (and deverbal) projections.
>The exception to this is the work in model-theoretic semantics,
>which while not oriented towards explaining syntactic phenomena
>such as agreement, does provide a systematic account of the
>argument-structure relationships in attributive and predicative
>adjectival constructions.

Well, as your formulation already implies, there are two sides
to this coin.  One is semantic and one is syntactic.  And
argument structure, or various versions of argument structure
have been used for both/either, thus giving rise to much
confusion.  The semantic view is usually not very good about
explaining the syntactic phenomena the syntacticians are worrying
about (linking, agreement, control, whatever), while the syntactic
view is usually not very good about explaining the semantic
phenomena the semanticists are worrying about (what gets predicated
where and what does it all *mean*?).

So, to me this actually suggests that there are at least two
major notions of argument structure floating around, used for
different things (but actually looking very much alike --- thus
making an understanding of what's going on a very tricky thing
indeed).

But this is a separate issue from your next point.


>
>Our model-theoretic semanticist friends, since Montague at least and
>probably back to Russell, have been analysing both attributive and
>predicative adjectives (as well as nouns and verbs) as having a single
>open argument slot.  They use a positional argument notation (the
>order in which the lambda-abstractions appear basically determines
>argument structure) whereas LFG uses a named argument notation (i.e.,
>argument slots are unordered, and identified by names such as SUBJ,
>OBJ, etc).  But modulo this difference, one might try to mimic the
>model-theoretic semantic analysis in LFG as follows.

No way!  I don't see grammatical functions as being one-to-one
with argument slots (see Alsina's various works).  In fact, LMT assumes an
ordered hierarchy of arguments.  Whereas grammatical functions are indeed
unordered at f-str.

So, there's a difference, and I think it is a great mistake to
conflate the two.

And I also think it is a great mistake to try to mimic model-theoretic
semantic analyses in terms of f-structure concepts/representations/notions.

After all, LFG does explicitly have this notion of a s(emantic)-structure,
and while it still appears to be open how exactly stuff is represented
at this level, I thought there was a consensus that semantics really
actually belonged here.

So, that if I were going to mimic model-theoretic semantics anywhere,
I would do it at this level, rather than trying to corrupt a syntactic
representation into a semantic one.

>If we name the single open argument slot in the model-theoretic
>semantic analysis the SUBJ argument, then the model-theoretic analysis
>can be viewed as claiming that _all_ nouns and adjectives have a SUBJ
>argument.

To take your example -- why use a SYNTACTIC notion for a semantic
one?  I would prefer that the SYNTACTIC notion of a SUBJ  retains all its
syntactic properties at f-structure, but that the SEMANTIC notion of
a subject be formulated in terms of s-structure (call it s-subj, or
something, whatever, just don't go around messing with the
syntactic notion of SUBJ).

Miriam