Virtually conceptually necessary

[Stefan Müller]

Hi everybody,

I read Paul Postal's article on Transformational Grammar:

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=187999

in which he discusses the following examples:

Quentin was rejected by Sally.
Quentin was rejected by Sally and was ignored by Louise.
Quentin and Ferdinand were respectively rejected by Sally and ignored by
Louise.
Those (two) losers were respectively rejected by Sally and ignored by
Louise.

I don't remember which house Marsha criticized.
I don't remember which house Marsha criticized and Marian later ignored.
I don't remember which house and which apartment Marsha criticized and
Marian praised, respectively.
I don't remember which three houses Marsha criticized, Marian praised
and Isabelle ignored, respectively.

I think he is right in pointing out that the coordination examples are
devastating for transformational approaches, especially the last examples.

He also mentioned that alternative theories do not have much to offer
either.

I guess HPSG has solutions for across the board extractions, but
distributing the referents from one NP into several VPs / clauses is a
special case.

I could imagine something that uses Tibor's anchors for this, but such a
solution seems rather technical ...

So my question is: Does somebody know of solutions to such problems in
constraint-based theories? Given that Postal's paper is 6 years old,
there might be a solution to this by now.

Maybe there is even some discussion in the Transformational literature I
am not aware of.

Thanks for all hints on this and best wishes

	Stefan

-- 
Stefan Müller       Tel: (+49) (+30) 838 52973
                    Fax: (+49) (030) 838 4 52973
Institut für Deutsche und Niederländische Philologie
Deutsche Grammatik
Habelschwerdter Allee 45
14 195 Berlin

http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/~stefan/

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