Professional Documents
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MARY DALRYMPLE
JOHN J. LOWE
LOUISE MYCOCK
1
3
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Preface
This book is based on work first published by Dalrymple (2001). Some chapters
from that book appear in this one, although the entire text has been overhauled
and revised. Some of the chapters in Part II of this book are entirely new. All in all,
this is not a new edition of the 2001 book, but a new book which includes parts of
the previous one.
As usual, the LFG community has been incredibly supportive of our work
in producing this book, and we are grateful to the many people who provided
comments, feedback, and support. We begin by conveying our thanks to Luke
Carr, Jamie Findlay, and Miltiadis Kokkonidis for helpful comments on Dalrymple
(2001).
We would like to single out three heroic individuals for special praise for their
dedication and thoroughness in reading and commenting on multiple versions of
the second edition as it took shape. Bozhil Hristov, Adam Przepiórkowski, and
Amanda Thomas each read through several versions of the entire book, giving
valuable comments and feedback each time. We have been particularly impressed
by Adam’s ability to detect problems from the microscopic to the macroscopic level.
We hope they will feel that the final version of the book reflects their hard work
and the helpful comments and suggestions that they made.
We are also grateful to those of our readers who commented in detail on entire
sections of the book. For detailed and helpful comments on the chapters in Part I,
we are grateful to Ash Asudeh, Alex Biswas, Ken Kahn, Leslie Lee, Joey Lovestrand,
Agnieszka Patejuk, Liselotte Snijders, and Martin Trpovski. For comments on Part
II, we are grateful to Ash Asudeh, Alex Biswas, Leslie Lee, and Joey Lovestrand.
We are also grateful to readers who provided comments on individual chapters
of the book. In Part I: Miriam Butt for Chapter 1 (Background and theoretical
assumptions); I Wayan Arka, Agnieszka Patejuk, and Ida Toivonen for Chapter 2
(Functional structure); Ida Toivonen for Chapter 3 (Constituent structure); Oleg
Belyaev and Ron Kaplan for Chapter 5 (Describing syntactic structures); and Ron
Kaplan for particularly detailed and helpful comments on Chapter 6 (Syntactic
relations and syntactic constraints). In Part II: Miriam Butt for Chapter 7 (Beyond
c-structure and f-structure: linguistic representations and relations) and Chapter
9 (Argument structure and mapping theory); Tina Bögel, Stephen Jones, and
Aditi Lahiri for Chapter 11 (Prosodic structure); and Miriam Butt, Louisa Sadler,
and Andy Spencer for Chapter 12 (The interface to morphology). In Part III:
Doug Arnold, Ash Asudeh, and Andy Morrison for Chapter 13 (Modification);
Dag Haug for Chapter 14 (Anaphora) and Chapter 15 (Functional and anaphoric
control); Doug Arnold, Oleg Belyaev, Dag Haug, John Lamping, Louisa Sadler,
and Vijay Saraswat for Chapter 16 (Coordination); Doug Arnold, Ash Asudeh,
Ron Kaplan, and Louisa Sadler for Chapter 17 (Long-distance dependencies); Ash
Asudeh, Aaron Broadwell, Kersti Börjars, Ron Kaplan, Peter Sells, Nigel Vincent,
and Andy Way for Chapter 18 (Related research threads and new directions); and
xviii preface
Liselotte Snijders for the bibliography. This book has been long in the making, and
we apologize if we have omitted reference to anyone whose comments we have
benefited from but who is not mentioned here.
For administrative support, we gratefully acknowledge the Faculty of Linguis-
tics, Philology, and Phonetics at the University of Oxford. We thank Julia Steer and
Vicki Sunter of OUP for very helpful advice, and for their patience over the long
course of the gestation of this book.
Mary Dalrymple is grateful to the following organizations for research support:
2011–14: Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Gobierno de España: “The syntax
and information structure of unbounded dependencies,” principal investigator
Prof. Alexandre Alsina, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona); 2012: British
Academy Small Grant “Plural semantics in Austronesian”; 2012–13: Leverhulme
Research Fellowship “Plurals: Morphology and Semantics,” RF-2012-295;
2017–2018: Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science
and Letters, “SynSem: From Form to Meaning—Integrating Linguistics and
Computing,” principal investigators Prof. Dag Haug and Prof. Stephan Oepen.
She is also grateful to Ken Kahn for all kinds of support, and to her sister Matty
for being an inspiration as a writer.
John Lowe is grateful to the following organizations for research support: 2012–
15: Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (ECF-2012-081); 2013–14: Ministerio de
Ciencia e Innovación, Gobierno de España: “The syntax and information structure
of unbounded dependencies,” principal investigator Prof. Alexandre Alsina, Uni-
versitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona); 2016: Jill Hart Fund for Indo-Iranian Philology,
University of Oxford. He is also grateful to his family for being a source of strength
and inspiration, especially to Helen, Henry, and Wilfred.
Louise Mycock is grateful to the following for research support: 2013–14: Min-
isterio de Ciencia e Innovación, Gobierno de España: “The syntax and informa-
tion structure of unbounded dependencies,” principal investigator Prof.Alexandre
Alsina, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona). She is also grateful to her family
for their ongoing support: her husband Chi Lun Pang, her grandparents Iris and
Brian, her dad Dave, her sisters Kathryn and Fiona and their partners, her nephew
Charlie, and her nieces Lily and Maisie.
List of Abbreviations
We have modified the glosses from our source materials for consistency with the
Leipzig Glossing Rules (Bickel et al. 2015), a simplified version of which we use
throughout the book. We use the following abbreviations:
1 first person
2 second person
3 third person
abs absolutive
acc accusative
active active
av active voice
aux auxiliary
b Chechen gender class B
caus causative
comp complementizer
d Chechen gender class D
dv dative voice
en Catalan en
erg ergative
excl exclusive
f feminine
fut future
fv final vowel
gen genitive
hi Catalan hi
incl inclusive
indf indefinite
inf infinitive
iprf imperfect
iv instrumental voice
link Tagalog linker
loc locative
m masculine
n neuter
nfut nonfuture
xx list of abbreviations
nom nominative
nonpl nonplural
nonsg nonsingular
npst nonpast
ov objective voice
pass passive
pfv perfective
pl plural
postneg postnegation
pot potential
prep preposition
prf perfect
prs present
pst past
q question particle
refl reflexive
scv Chechen simultaneous converb
sg singular
vm Hungarian verbal modifier
wp Chechen witnessed past
1
Background and theoretical
assumptions
The Oxford Reference Guide to Lexical Functional Grammar. First edition. Mary Dalrymple, John J. Lowe, and Louise
Mycock. © Mary Dalrymple, John J. Lowe, and Louise Mycock 2019. First published 2019 by Oxford University Press.
2 background and theoretical assumptions
The existing transformational framework would not have led to the prediction that
transformations would operate in this way. Since transformations were not con-
strained as to the output structure they produced, it was surprising that they would
produce structures like those that the basic grammar could otherwise generate.
This important finding had wide-reaching implications: the basic phrase structure
of languages is invariant, and the application of particular transformations does
not alter this basic phrase structure.
Why should so many transformations have been structure-preserving in this
sense? Bresnan (1978) made the key observation: all structure-preserving trans-
formations can be reformulated as lexical redundancy rules. According to this view,
operations on the abstract syntactic argument structure of a lexical item produce
a new syntactic argument structure, with a surface form that is realized in an
expected way by a basic phrase structure grammar. This allowed an abstract and
uniform crosslinguistic characterization of argument alternations like the active-
passive relation, while also allowing for a theory of crosslinguistic similarities and
differences in the phrasal expression of the different alternations.
With this, the need emerged for a theory allowing simultaneous expression
of both the phrasal constituency of a sentence and its more abstract functional
syntactic organization. The formal insights leading to the development of Lexi-
cal Functional Grammar arose originally from the work of Woods (1970), who
explored methods for representing the surface constituent structure of a sentence
together with more abstract syntactic information. Building on this work, Kaplan
(1975a,b, 1976) realized that placing certain constraints on the representation of
abstract syntactic structure and its relation to surface phrasal structure would
lead to a simple, formally coherent, and linguistically well-motivated grammatical
architecture. Based on these formal underpinnings, the relation of the abstract
functional syntactic structure of a sentence to its phrase structure could be fully
explored. More information about the historical development of the theory is
provided by Dalrymple et al. (1995a) and Bresnan et al. (2016).
functional structure, and the relation between them. A clear understanding of the
concepts presented in Chapter 5 is essential for the discussion in the rest of the
book. Chapter 6 is best thought of as a compendium of relatively more advanced
formal tools and relations, and may be most profitably used as a reference in
understanding the analyses presented in the rest of the book.
The second part of the book explores nonsyntactic levels of linguistic struc-
ture and the modular architecture of LFG. Chapter 7 (Beyond c-structure and
f-structure: Linguistic representations and relations) sets the scene for our explo-
ration of other linguistic levels and their relation to constituent structure and
functional structure, presenting LFG’s projection architecture and outlining how
different grammatical levels are related to one another. Chapter 8 (Meaning and
semantic composition) introduces the LFG view of the syntax-semantics interface
and semantic representation, according to which the meaning of an utterance
is determined via logical deduction from a set of premises associated with the
subparts of the utterance. Chapter 9 (Argument structure and mapping theory)
discusses the content and representation of argument structure, its relation to
syntax, and its role in determining the syntactic functions of the arguments of a
predicate. Chapter 10 (Information structure) introduces the level of information
structure, the structuring of an utterance in context, and explores the relation of
information structure to other linguistic levels. Chapter 11 (Prosodic structure)
introduces the level of prosodic structure, which analyzes the string in parallel with
constituent structure, but with respect to prosodic units rather than phrasal units.
Chapter 12 (The interface to morphology) discusses the place of morphology in
the architecture of LFG, showing how a realizational theory of morphology can be
integrated in an LFG setting.
The third part of the book illustrates the concepts of the theory more explicitly
by presenting a series of sketches of the syntax and semantics of a range of repre-
sentative linguistic phenomena. We present the syntactic aspects of the analyses
separately from the semantic aspects, so readers who are not interested in formal
semantic analysis should still be able to profit from the syntactic discussion in these
chapters. In this part, we often leave aside analysis of the information structure,
prosody, and morphology of these phenomena, though we sometimes include an
analysis of these other aspects as well, in line with the increasing awareness of the
importance of adopting a holistic approach and taking account of the interplay
of linguistic modules in a full account of the data. Chapter 13 (Modification)
discusses the syntax and semantics of modifiers, particularly concentrating on
modification of nouns by adjectives. Chapter 14 (Anaphora) presents a theory
of the syntax and semantics of anaphoric binding, including both intrasentential
and intersentential anaphora. Chapter 15 (Functional and anaphoric control)
discusses constructions involving control, where the referent of the subject of a
subordinate clause is determined by lexical or constructional factors. Chapter 16
(Coordination) presents an analysis of aspects of the syntax and semantics of coor-
dination, and Chapter 17 (Long-distance dependencies) discusses long-distance
dependencies in topicalization, relative clause formation, and question formation.
The final chapter of the book, Chapter 18 (Related research threads and new
directions), discusses LFG-based work in areas not covered elsewhere in the book,
as well as new developments in the theory of LFG, including work in historical
how to use the book 5
• For the semantics chapter in Part II (Chapter 8) and the semantics sections of
the chapters in Part III, Gamut (1991a,b) and Partee et al. (1993: Chapter 7)
provide useful background.
• Chapter 10 discusses information structure, its representation, and its place
in the overall LFG architecture. There is some discussion of information
structure in Chapter 17, but it should be possible to follow almost all of the
discussion in Chapter 17 even without familiarity with the material presented
in Chapter 10. For an overview and introduction to information structure, see
Lambrecht (1994) and Erteschik-Shir (2007: Chapters 1–3).
• The content and representation of prosodic structure is discussed in
Chapter 11, but does not figure in the analyses presented in Part III. For
an introduction to the concepts discussed in Chapter 11, see Selkirk (1984),
Nespor and Vogel (2007), and Ladd (2008).
• The analyses presented in Part III also do not include morphological analysis,
and so the morphology chapter in Part II (Chapter 12) can be skipped by
6 background and theoretical assumptions
those who are not concerned with morphology and its interface with the rest
of the grammar. Spencer (2004) and Haspelmath and Sims (2011) provide a
solid introduction to morphology, and Stewart (2015) provides an overview
of contemporary morphological theories. Stump (2001: Chapter 1) is an
introduction to issues in morphological theory with a focus on the word-
and-paradigm model, providing a theoretical underpinning for the family of
realizational theories which that chapter adopts.
LFG assumes two different ways of representing syntactic structure, the constituent
structure or c-structure and the functional structure or f-structure. Within the
overall system of linguistic structures, these constitute two subsystems. Functional
structure is the abstract functional syntactic organization of the sentence, famil-
iar from traditional grammatical descriptions, representing syntactic predicate-
argument structure and functional relations like subject and object. Constituent
structure is the overt, more concrete level of linear and hierarchical organization
of words into phrases.
Section 2.1 presents motivation for the categories and information appearing
in functional structure and outlines some common characteristics of functional
structure categories. Section 2.2 demonstrates that grammatical functions are best
treated as primitive concepts, as they are in LFG, rather than defined in terms
of morphological or phrase structure concepts. Section 2.3 shows that syntac-
tic subcategorization requirements, the array of syntactic arguments required by
a predicate, are best stated in functional terms. The formal representation of
functional structure and constraints on f-structure representations are discussed
in §2.4. Finally, §2.5 provides an overview of the content and representation of
functional structure features.
The Oxford Reference Guide to Lexical Functional Grammar. First edition. Mary Dalrymple, John J. Lowe, and Louise
Mycock. © Mary Dalrymple, John J. Lowe, and Louise Mycock 2019. First published 2019 by Oxford University Press.
10 functional structure
However, the subject phrase in such a question may not appear in sentence-initial
position if the subordinate clause begins with a word like that, though this is
possible for the object phrase:1
In fact, the subject-object distinction is only one aspect of a rich set of distinc-
tions among grammatical functions. Keenan and Comrie (1977: 66) propose a
more fine-grained analysis of abstract grammatical structure, the Keenan-Comrie
Hierarchy or Accessibility Hierarchy, stating that “the positions on the Accessibility
Hierarchy are to be understood as specifying a set of possible grammatical dis-
tinctions that a language may make.” They claim that the hierarchy is relevant
for various linguistic constructions, including relative clause formation, where
it restricts the grammatical function of the argument in the relative clause that
is interpreted as coreferent with the modified noun. The border between any
two adjacent grammatical functions in the hierarchy can represent a distinction
between acceptable and unacceptable relative clauses in a language, and different
languages can set the border at different places on the hierarchy:2
In some languages, the hierarchy distinguishes subjects from all other grammatical
functions: only the subject of a relative clause can be relativized, or interpreted as
coreferent with the noun modified by the relative clause. Other languages allow rel-
ativization of subjects and objects in contrast to other grammatical functions. This
more fine-grained hierarchical structure allows further functional distinctions to
emerge.
Keenan and Comrie speculate that their hierarchy plays a role in the analysis
of other grammatical constructions besides relative clause formation, and indeed
Comrie (1974) applies the hierarchy in an analysis of grammatical functions in
causative constructions. In fact, the Keenan-Comrie hierarchy closely mirrors the
“relational hierarchy” of Relational Grammar, as given by Bell (1983), upon which
much work in Relational Grammar is based:
The labels obj𝜃 and obl𝜃 represent families of relations indexed by thematic roles,
with the 𝜃 subscript representing the thematic role associated with the argument.
For instance, objtheme is the member of the group of thematically restricted obj𝜃
functions that bears the thematic role theme, and oblsource and oblgoal are
members of the obl𝜃 group of grammatical functions filling the source and goal
thematic roles. These clearly stated relations between thematic roles and grammat-
ical functions reflect a broader generalization about grammatical functions within
the LFG framework. As Bresnan et al. (2016: 9) put it, grammatical functions are
the “relators” of phrase structure positions to thematic roles. Structural expressions
of a particular grammatical function vary crosslinguistically, but a characteristic
mapping to argument structure exists in all cases.
3 The grammatical function hierarchy given in (5) lists only grammatical functions that play a
role within the clause. We discuss the grammatical function poss, the function borne by prenominal
genitives within the English noun phrase, in §2.1.10.
12 functional structure
(7) a. The girl handed the baby a toy on Tuesday in the morning.
b. ⃰David saw Tony George Sally.
Alternation: Only arguments can alternate with subjects and objects; see
Needham and Toivonen (2011):
4 These tests do not give clear-cut results in all cases. For discussion of contentious cases, see §9.10.5.
grammatical functions and functional structure 15
In (10) and (11), the reflexive’s antecedent is the subject Jon, which is an argument
of the same verbal predicate. By contrast, when the reflexive appears as part of a
modifier phrase, as in (12), the sentence is ungrammatical.
In contrast, reordering arguments may affect the meaning of the sentence, focusing
attention on one or another argument, but does not alter the conditions under
which the sentence is true.
(14) a.⃰Which famous professor did Kim climb K2 without oxygen in order to
impress ?
b. Which famous professor did Kim attempt to impress by climbing K2
without oxygen?
This generalization is not as robust as those discussed above, since as Pollard and
Sag point out, it is possible to extract a phrase from some modifiers:
5 Relational grammar (Perlmutter and Postal 1983) also recognizes this basic division of grammatical
functions into “term relations” and “oblique relations.” Terms are also sometimes referred to as “core
functions” (Andrews 2007a; Bresnan et al. 2016).
16 functional structure
Control: Kroeger (1993) shows that in Tagalog, only a term can be the con-
trollee in the participial complement construction, and only a term can be a con-
troller in the participial adjunct construction. The sentences in (17) are examples
of the participial complement construction. The controllee can be a term (17a,b),
but never a nonterm (17c):
The clausal complement that Chris was yawning bears the grammatical function
comp in (19):
The xcomp function differs from the comp function in not containing an overt
subj internal to its phrase; xcomp is an open function, whose subj is determined
by means of lexical specifications on the predicate that governs it, as discussed in
§2.1.7. What is the termhood status of the xcomp and comp arguments?
Zaenen and Engdahl (1994) classify xcomp as a kind of oblique in their
analysis of the linking of sentential and predicative complements, though without
providing explicit evidence in support of this classification. Oblique arguments are
nonterms, and so if Zaenen and Engdahl are correct, xcomp would be classified as
a nonterm.
Word order requirements on infinitival and finite complements in English
provide some support for this position. Sag (1987) claims that in English, term
phrases always precede obliques:
Since the xcomp to be unhappy is not required to precede the oblique phrase to
Sandy but can appear either before or after it, Sag’s diagnostic indicates that the
xcomp must also be an oblique. Similar data indicate that comp is also an oblique
phrase:
Semantically unrestricted functions like subj and obj can be associated with any
thematic role, as Fillmore (1968) shows:
18 functional structure
The examples in (24) show that the subj of different verbs can be associated with
different thematic roles: agent in a sentence like He hit the ball, goal in a sentence
like He received a gift, and so on. Similar examples can be constructed for obj.
In contrast, members of the semantically restricted family of functions obj𝜃 and
obl𝜃 are associated with a particular thematic role. For example, the objtheme
function is associated only with the thematic role of theme, and the oblgoal
is associated with goal. Languages may differ in the inventory of semantically
restricted functions they allow. For example, English allows only objtheme :
Other thematic roles cannot be associated with the second object position, under-
lined in these examples:
2.1.5 SUBJ
The subject is the term argument that ranks the highest on the Keenan-Comrie
relativization hierarchy. As discussed in §2.1.1, Keenan and Comrie’s hierarchy is
applicable to a number of processes including relativization: if only one type of
argument can participate in certain processes for which a grammatical function
hierarchy is relevant, that argument is often the subject.
There is no lack of tests referring specifically to the subject function.
Agreement: The subject is often the argument that controls verb agreement in
languages in which verbs bear agreement morphology; indeed, Moravcsik (1978)
proposes the following language universal:
There is no language which includes sentences where the verb agrees with a constituent
distinct from the intransitive subject and which would not also include sentences where the
verb agrees with the intransitive subject. (Moravcsik 1978: 364)
Honorification: Matsumoto (1996) calls this the most reliable subject test in
Japanese. Certain honorific forms of verbs are used to honor the referent of the
subject:
The verb form o-V ni narimasu is used to honor the subject sensei ‘teacher’. It can-
not be used to honor a nonsubject, even if the argument is a “logical subject”/agent.
Like example (29), example (30) is grammatical because the honorific verb form is
used to honor the subject sensei ‘teacher’:
A proper name is used only when the referent is not superior to the speaker in
age or social rank: example (31) is unacceptable because Jon is not an appropriate
target of honorification, and sensei is not the subject:
grammatical functions and functional structure 21
Bell (1983: 154 ff.) shows that the same is true in Cebuano.
This is only a sampling of the various tests for subjecthood. Many other tests could,
of course, be cited (see, for example, Andrews 2007a; Falk 2006; Li 1976; Zaenen
1982; Zaenen et al. 1985).
The question of whether every clause has a subj is controversial. The Subject
Condition7 was discussed by Bresnan and Kanerva (1989), who attribute it origi-
nally to Baker (1983) (see also Levin 1987; Butt et al. 1999):
Though the Subject Condition seems to hold in English, and perhaps in many
other languages as well, there are languages in which the requirement does not so
clearly hold. For example, German impersonal passives, as in (35), are traditionally
analyzed as subjectless clauses:
However, Berman (1999, 2003) claims that clauses like (35) contain an unpro-
nounced expletive subject and thus that the Subject Condition is not violated. She
argues that in a German impersonal passive construction the verbal agreement
morphology (specifically the 3sg form) introduces a subject that has only person
and number agreement features: that is, an expletive subject without semantic
content. In this way, every finite clause in German satisfies the Subject Condition.
Kibort (2006) discusses Polish constructions which, similar to the German
construction in (35), appear to be subjectless. These clauses contain one of a small
number of inherently impersonal predicates, such as słychać ‘hear’, as in (36a), or
an intransitive predicate which has been passivized, as in (36b), which is similar to
the German example in (35). In (36a), the lack of a syntactic subject is reflected
in the form of the verb used: the verb słychać ‘hear’ has the same form as the
infinitive. Since this is a nonfinite verb form, there is no agreement morphology
to introduce subject features, in contrast to the German construction analyzed
by Berman. (36b) contains the passivized form of an intransitive predicate, było
sypane ‘has been spreading’, which bears default impersonal agreement (3sg.n).
The agent can optionally appear as an oblique argument:
On the basis of such data, Kibort (2006) argues that truly subjectless constructions
exist in Polish. It may be, then, that the Subject Condition is a language-particular
requirement imposed by some but not all languages, rather than a universal
requirement.
An alternative, more fine-grained view of subject properties and the notion of
subjecthood is explored in detail by Falk (2006). The core of Falk’s proposal is
that the grammatical function subject represents the conflation of two distinct
functions: the element that expresses the most prominent argument of the verb
(gf)
% and the element that connects its clause to other clauses in a sentence (pivot).
Prominence in the case of gf % is defined in terms of the mapping between the
thematic hierarchy (comprising thematic roles such as agent, theme, location) and
the relational hierarchy (comprising grammatical functions). Falk (2006: 39) thus
defines gf
% as being “the element with the function of expressing as a core argument
the hierarchically most prominent argument,” and argues that a subset of “subject
grammatical functions and functional structure 23
However, pivot and not gf % is the target of relativization in relative clause forma-
tion: the relativized argument is the single argument of the intransitive predicate
‘angry’ or the object of ‘kill’, but not the gf
% of ‘take’.
8 Falk attributes the examples in (37) and (38) to Manning (1996b). We present them in simplified
form, leaving out morphological detail.
24 functional structure
Falk (2006) proposes that gf% plays a role in all languages, in the sense that
all languages have clauses including gf% as an argument. However, he holds that
the requirement for all clauses to include gf
% as an argument holds only for some
languages, similar to Kibort’s (2006) claims in relation to the Subject Condition.
In particular, Falk (2006: 170) proposes that certain intransitive Acehnese verbs
(those with agentive subjects, such as “go”) require a gf, % while certain others
(those with nonagentive subjects, such as “fall”) require an object, not gf.
% pivot
has a different status: Falk tentatively proposes that some languages, including
Choctaw/Chickasaw and Warlpiri, lack a pivot altogether. Such languages would
be expected to lack pivot-sensitive constructions such as long-distance dependen-
cies and functional control constructions.
In order to maintain consistency with the vast majority of previous work in the
LFG framework and because the distinction between gf % and pivot is not crucial
to the analyses we present, we will continue to use subj. However, this does not
mean that we reject the important distinctions involving different aspects of the
subj role that Falk explores.
In (39), the morpheme -terir encodes third person plural agreement with the obj
a resensei ‘teachers’.
However, Mohanan goes on to show that many phrases in Malayalam that are obj
are not marked with acc case. That is, every phrase in Malayalam that is acc is an
obj, but not all objs are acc.
Relativization: Givón (1997: §4.4.3) notes that only subjects and objects can
be relativized in Kinyarwanda, and only objects can be relativized with a gap;
relativization of subjects requires the use of a resumptive pronoun.
2.1.6.1 Multiple objects In many languages it is possible to have more than one
phrase bearing an object function in a sentence. English is one such language:
Zaenen et al. (1985) discuss Icelandic, another language with multiple object
functions, and note the existence of asymmetries between the two kinds of objects.
For instance, the primary object can be the antecedent of a reflexive contained in
the secondary object:
However, the secondary object cannot antecede a reflexive contained in the pri-
mary object:
In contrast, as Bresnan and Moshi (1990) show, languages like Kichaga allow
multiple thematically restricted objects with roles other than theme:9
This example contains three object markers, representing a locative object (17obj),
an instrumental object (8obj), and a patient object (7obj). According to Bresnan
and Moshi’s analysis, in this example the instrumental obj is the unrestricted
obj; the locative and patient arguments bear thematically restricted obj functions
objloc and objpatient . Bresnan and Moshi provide much more discussion of obj𝜃
in Kichaga and other Bantu languages.
While the division of the object functions into thematically unrestricted obj and
a family of thematically restricted object functions (obj𝜃 ) represents the main-
stream approach in LFG, the notion of object and its possible subtypes remains
relatively understudied, as Börjars and Vincent (2008) point out. In a paper which
considers object as a pretheoretical construct as well as the concept obj within LFG,
Börjars and Vincent (2008) argue that the object role is not associated with specific
semantic content but should rather be viewed as a “semantically inert” grammatical
function.
The classification of a book as a direct object in both (46) and (47) may have a
semantic rather than a syntactic basis: there may be a tendency to assume that
a book must bear the same grammatical function in each instance because its
thematic role does not change. The LFG view differs: in example (46), the phrase
her bears the obj function, while in example (47), the phrase a book is the obj.
Within the transformational tradition, evidence for the LFG classification of
English objects came from certain formulations of the rule of passivization, which
applies uniformly to “transform” an object into a subject:
10 Dryer assumes a more complicated crosslinguistic typology of object functions than is generally
accepted in LFG. His richer typology turns out to be best explained in terms of different strategies for
relating thematic roles to object grammatical functions, as described in Chapter 9.
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[1902] But began by. MS.
[1903]
[1965]
[1966]
Contents:
57 How King Richard the second... Page 58 corrected to 56.
69 How the Lorde Clyfford... Page 198 corrected to 195.
97 The Poem annexed called England’s Eliza. Page 783 corrected to 813.
Footnote 926 (page 178 “Then came the duke of Somerset”) is not marked
as a footnote in the original, but follows the text at this point, in the footnote
section of the page.
The editor has used scribal abbreviations in the text. These have been
expanded to the intended words, as the exact form of the original notation
cannot be reproduced here. These substitutions were made:
m͞ me
o͞ on
Qd Quod
wt with
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