universality of gfs

[Rachel Nordlinger]

In an attempt to clear up some of Farrell's misunderstandings from my
earlier posts...

Farrell Ackerman said:

>if one is concerned solely with argument selection, then it would be
>reasonable to contrast lfg's lexical mapping theory (bresnan and
>kanerva etc.) or functional mapping theory (alsina) with goldberg's
>argument structure construction proposal in this domain: personally
>over the years I have found both lmt and fmt to be the least
>compelling aspects of lfg, but it seems strange to me to contrast
>"goldberg's construction grammar", i.e., a hypothesis about argument
>selection" with lfg, i.e., a general theory of grammar, as rachel
>suggests is happening 
>

I never intended to suggest that anyone was doing anything more than
chosing Goldberg's construction grammar approach to argument selection
over standard lfg approaches to the same phenomena.  None of the
discussions that I had with people here, and which prompted my initial
question to Joan, were concerned with the larger and more general
picture of CG vs. LFG.  They merely came out of the fact that a couple
people wanting to describe aspects of argument structure and argument
selection in the languages they worked on---languages which (they
claim) have no evidence for grammatical functions---found Goldberg's
construction approach more appealing to them than the standard lfg
alternative since it did not require them to posit grammatical
relations when there was no evidence for them in the language.

This led me to wonder how such facts "fit" with standard assumptions
within the lfg tradition, partly as a way of determining what lfg
could be shown to offer them that the Construction Grammar approach
they were using might not.  The focus of the lfg approach on universal
structure and defining the larger typological space, as has been
brought up in many of the recent messages, is clearly one very strong
advantage of the lfg approach in this respect.

>I guess i'm in the dark at the moment about how to react specifically
>to the claims about the absence of gfs in the Australian language
>Jaminjun because I don't know what specific assumptions are being made
>and how these congeal into an analysis of grammatical phenomena in
>that language: is it just the absence of universalist claims for gfs
>that makes cg a more appropriate framework to formulate an analysis of
>this language in?  

Yes.  That seems to be the basic appeal.

>how does goldberg's story formulated for english
>and cached out in terms of surface structure arrangements of nouns and
>verbs translate into languages where there is a lot of
>morphology and surface orders are less relevant.  I know that this is
>supposed to follow
>from the claim that both phrases (including sentences) and morphology
>are "constructions", but i'm not really sure that I know what this
>means in practice.  in contrast, lfg has a fairly strong and explicit
>tradition of characterizing the relation between syntax and morphology
>under the recent rubric "morphology competes with syntax": mightn't
>this fairly well-developed aspect of lfg be more useful than cg
>presently in a language where morphology has syntactic force?  

The claim for Jaminjung, as far as I understand it, is that all of the
syntactic and morphological facts of the language can be explained
without reference to grammatical functions such as "subject" and
"object".  There are no controlled clauses, valence-changing
operations, etc. that operate on these grammatical functions.  There
is argument cross-referencing on the verb, but this can be explained
as cross-referencing "agent" and "patient" (rather like the Acehnese
data Joan mentioned in an earlier post). (Note however, that this
cross-referencing system, along with the distribution of absolutive
case, can be used to make a term/oblique distinction such as Avery
mentioned in his earlier message.) The case marking is consistently
ergative-absolutive, and so can be explained in the same way.  The
analysis that has been proposed by the researcher of this language
involves, for example, an 'ergative-absolutive' case construction,
which maps certain thematic roles of the verb's argument structure
onto certain case marked positions, and a 'cross-referencing'
construction which does the same thing for pronominal/agreement
positions on the verb.  I have argued with her about the fact that one
could do the same thing and achieve the same effect within the lfg
framework, but she still doesn't like the fact that she would be
required to use terms like "subject" and "object" in the f-structure,
when there is no language-internal reason to do so.

I realise that that has probably not answered your question, Farrell,
in the detail that you were after, but it's the best I can do for
now......I am quickly learning my lesson about the dangers of initiating
a discussion based on other people's data and analyses that you don't
know very much about yourself!!!!

Rachel