Predicate Clefts in LFG [Warning: long and possibly boring]

[Joan Bresnan]

Hi, Ash.  As I mentioned in my msg to Seth, I've just now had time to
read through the conversation.  I like your proposed solution to the
verb-focusing problem, which appears not only in predicate clefting,
but also wherever verbs fill a focus position, with or without
copying/extraction (Wambaya comes to mind as an example).  By focusing
the PRED, rather than the f-structure of the V, one avoids the big
circular f-structures that would arise and one also isolates the verb content
itself for focusing.  Nice idea!  So when a verb is focused by
extraction into a focus position (rather than by predicate clefting),
we could have---by means of  (^ PRED) = ((... ^)FOCUS) if we go inside-out:

     [ FOCUS [ ]_i
       S ["john"]
       PRED [REL eat]_i
       O ["salt"]]

If the constraints on the extraction variable "..." are universal, it
is probably not necessary to write them into each grammar description.

J.


> Hello Seth and LFG-listers,
>
> I'm not sure that I have anything terribly enlightening to contribute
> and I'm not very familiar with the kind of predicate clefts that you
> asked about, but I have a few things I wanted to mention.
>
> First, I think the "resumptive pronoun" theory of predicate clefts is
> not too promising. The only similarity between resumptive pronouns and
> the kinds of clefts that Koopman (1983) has in mind is that there is
> something at the top of an unbounded dependency and rather than a gap at
> the bottom there's also "something".
>
> Here's a couple of  examples from Koopman (1983). I can't reproduce the
> tone accents.
>
> 1) ngOnU n   wa   na n   ka    ngOnU a
>    sleep you want NA you FUT-A sleep-Q
>    'Do you want to SLEEP'
>    (Koopman 1983:154,(2a))
>
> 2) mlI   wa   mlI
>    leave they leave
>    They LEFT.
>    (Koopman 1983
>
> The reason that Koopman relates this verb doubling to WH-movement is
> that a) long movement is possible across a bridge verb, 2) the movement
> is island-sensitive and cannot get out of WH-islands or Complex NP
> islands (Koopman 1983:161-162). However, the hallmark of resumptive
> pronoun dependencies is that they are *not* island sensitive. This is a
> general claim about resumptives and it certainly seems to be true in the
> majority of languages that have been investigated. There have been
> attempts to derive resumptives by movement (the most recent is probably
> Boeckx's dissertation), but these always have problems with the island
> facts (and would presumably have problems with the very robust fact that
> filler-gap dependencies show form-identity effects between the filler
> and the gap site, e.g. "whom", whereas the binder of a resumptive
> pronoun never bears the case features of the resumptive; see Merchant
> 2001).
>
> So I guess we're in agreement that the resumptive pronoun explanation is
> not promising, since you didn't try to take it up.
>
> Second, although I think I understand the gist of your sketch of an
> analysis, this kind of predicate clefting will be just as hard to
> accommodate in LFG's theory of unbounded dependencies as it was in the
> GB theory Koopman was working in and as it is on just about anyone's
> current theory, I think (who knows what's out there, though!). If we were
> trying to use outside-in functional uncertainty like in Kaplan and Zaenen
> (1989), then the problem is that there's nothing to grab onto. If the
> downstairs verb is contributing ^ = v as usual, then it bears no GF for
> the outside-in uncertainty to terminate in. If we're using inside-out
> uncertainty, as used in versions of LFG that have (some) traces (Bresnan
> 1995, 2001, Falk 2001), then we can find the predicate cleft by looking up
> the tree, as in your sketch. However, I don't think that the standard
> unbounded dependency function FOCUS is what we should be looking for.
>
> This brings me to the third problem. If the predicate cleft bears the
> FOCUS function or any function you might want to use in a standard
> unbounded dependency in LFG, then there has to be some way of integrating
> it into the grammatical representation in order to satisfy the Extended
> Coherence Condition. The two standard ways to do this are by functional
> equality of TOPIC/FOCUS with some GF (the method used in standard
> filler-gap dependencies) or by anaphoric binding of some GF by the
> TOPIC/FOCUS (the method that I argue in my thesis should be used for
> resumptive pronouns). But then the problem of identifying the GF presents
> itself again: the main verb is ^ = v, not (^ GF) = v.
>
>
> Here's a sketch of how I would start to think about this. I guess it bears
> the most similarity to the "do support" theory that you allude to,
> although it is not literally do support at all.
>
> Koopman (1983:158) observes that the basic generalization about which
> verbs in Vata can be clefted is that "any verb with a base form may
> occur in the predicate cleft construction". In particular, verbs that
> lack a base form *cannot* be predicate-clefted. Notice that by "base
> form" Koopman means that the root of the clefted verb can be the input
> to morphological processes and that the clefted verb can therefore have
> all kinds of morphology (including causative, applicative, etc.).
> Furthermore, the clefted verb bears the segmental form of the cleft
> target, but does not bear its tonal specification, taking only mid tone
> (Koopman 1983:155). These facts strongly indicate that formation of the
> predicate clefted verb is a lexical process, rather than any kind of
> syntactic "copying".
>
> Suppose the lexical process did the following:
> 1. Takes a base form and copies its segmental make up
> 2. Copies none of the syntactic or semantic information of the base form
>
> So the gist is that there is a lexical process that takes verbs that can
> form bases for regular morphology, etc.,  and copies their
> morphophonological information (except the tones) and makes a set of
> matching "dummy" verbs.
>
> These verbs are then inserted into the f-structure in some discourse
> function, call it VFOCUS. In order to integrate VFOCUS we identify the
> PRED of the predicate cleft target with that of the predicate cleft via
> functional uncertainty. So the following kind of equation sits on some
> appropriate part of the c-structure for the predicate cleft:
>
> (^ PRED) = ((VFOCUS ^) COMP* PRED)
>
> So the VFOCUS dummy takes the PRED of the f-structure that contains the
> VFOCUS or, again starting with the f-structure that takes the VFOCUS, the
> PRED of an arbitrarily deeply embedded COMP.
>
> Now this will look really weird to LFG people. However, recall that the
> dummy verb that was the output of the proposed lexical process has no
> syntactic or semantic information of its own.
>
> So how does the island stuff follow? Well the standard ways of capturing
> island effects in LFG are either by tweaking the functional uncertainty
> path or by using off-path constraints. The equation above already captures
> the Complex NP island facts, since NPs cannot be COMPS (presumably this is
> true in the relevant predicate-cleft languages, too).  As for the
> wh-islands, we would need an off-path equation. We could grab the solution
> that Dalrymple (2001:148ff.) proposes for capturing lack of movement
> across non-bridge verbs, with a feature LDD (long distance dependency):
>
> (^ PRED) = ((VFOCUS ^)    COMP*       PRED)
> 			           (-> LDD) ~= -
>
>
> Perhaps the wh-islands should really be captured in terms of FOCUS. The
> details are not that important, given that I'm just brazenly throwing
> ideas around. The overarching point is that by positing the lexical
> process that creates "dummy" copies and by making this copy take the a
> PRED value using functional uncertainty we have related the mechanism
> governing the predicate cleft to the mechanism governing unbounded
> dependencies of the filler-gap variety. Namely, the ones that are
> island-sensitive.
>
> Of course, there's a whole host of residual issues:
>
> 1. If a PRED can be shared, then Completeness may have to be tweaked so
> that they are satisfied as long as the subcategorized grammatical
> functions are found in some f-structure that has the PRED in question
> (in this case the f-structure of the main verb). This would be
> interesting, since it would be the analogous case for Completeness as
> that raised by functional control for Coherence with respect to, e.g.,
> reflexive binding. I personally advocate reducing Completeness and
> Coherence to the resource-sensitivity of Glue Semantics, in which case
> this is not an issue (although a lot of other cases would have to be
> checked!)
>
> 2. Speaking of semantics, we need to figure out the semantics of the
> predicate cleft. Unlike a resumptive pronoun which works more or less like
> a bound variable, the predicate cleft seems to have "fancier" semantics.
>
> 3. Staying on semantics, Koopman shows that the predicate cleft can take
> adverbial modification:
>
> 3)  ye    kpe    lagO  ye
>     come  really rain  comes
>     'It is really RAINING, isn't it'
>     (Koopman 1983:156,(7))
>
> So for a start we might want to identify the s-structure resource of the
> predicate clefted "dummy" with that of the copied verb:
>
> sigma(^) = sigma((VFOCUS ^) COMP*)
>
> This would allow the adverbial inside the predicate cleft to take scope
> over the cleft target. It also fits well with the fact that their PREDs
> are shared.
>
> 4. What ensures that the inserted dummy is the lexically produced dummy
> that matches the cleft target? How do we get (4) and avoid (5):
>
> 4)   X ... X
> 5) * X ... Y
>
> I think it would be reasonable to appeal to general recoverability
> conditions here. Otherwise we could use some kind of feature to control
> things
>
>
> [ADD MORE RESIDUAL ISSUES TO TASTE]
>
> Best,
> Ash
>
>
> REFERENCES
>
> @PhdThesis{boeckx01,
>   author = 	 {Cedric A. Boeckx},
>   title = 	 {Mechanisms of Chain Formation},
>   school = 	 {University of Connecticut},
>   year = 	 2001,
>   address =	 {Storrs, CT}
> }
>
> @InCollection{bresnan95,
>   author = 	 {Joan Bresnan},
>   title = 	 {Linear Order, Syntactic Rank, and Empty Categories: On
> Weak Crossover},
>   booktitle = 	 {Formal Issues in {Lexical-Functional Grammar}},
>   crossref =	 {dalrymple;ea95},
>   pages =	 {241--274}
> }
>
> @Book{bresnan01,
>   author =	 {Joan Bresnan},
>   title = 	 {{Lexical-Functional Syntax}},
>   publisher = 	 {Blackwell},
>   year = 	 2001,
>   address =	 {Oxford}
> }
>
> @Book{dalrymple;ea95,
>   editor =	 {Mary Dalrymple and Ronald M. Kaplan and John T. Maxwell
> and Annie Zaenen},
>   title = 	 {Formal issues in {L}exical-{F}unctional {G}rammar},
>   publisher = 	 {CSLI},
>   year = 	 1995,
>   address =	 {Stanford, CA}
> }
>
> @Book{dalrymple01,
>   author =	 {Mary Dalrymple},
>   title = 	 {{Lexical Functional Grammar}},
>   publisher = 	 {Academic Press},
>   year = 	 2001,
>   address =	 {San Diego, CA}
> }
>
> @Book{falk01,
>   author =	 {Yehuda Falk},
>   title = 	 {{Lexical-Functional Grammar}: An Introduction to Parllel
> Constraint-Based Syntax},
>   publisher = 	 {CSLI Publications},
>   year = 	 {2001},
>   address =	 {Stanford, CA}
> }
>
> @InCollection{kaplan;zaenen89,
>   author = 	 {Ronald M. Kaplan and Annie Zaenen},
>   title = 	 {Long-distance dependencies, constituent structure, and
> functional uncertainty},
>   booktitle = 	 {Alternative Conceptions of Phrase Structure},
>   crossref =	 {baltin;kroch89},
>   note =	 {Reprinted in \citet{dalrymple;ea95}}
> }
>
> @Book{koopman83,
>   author =	 {Hilda Koopman},
>   title = 	 {The Syntax of Verbs: From Verb Movement Rules in the
> {Kru} Languages to {Universal Grammar}},
>   publisher = 	 {Foris},
>   year = 	 1983,
>   address =	 {Dordrecht}
> }
>
> @Book{merchant01,
>   author =	 {Jason Merchant},
>   title = 	 {The Syntax of Silence},
>   publisher = 	 {Oxford University Press},
>   year = 	 2001,
>   address =	 {Oxford}
> }