Andreas Kathol (kathol@ling.ohio-state.edu)
Tue, 25 Jul 1995 02:31:53 -0400 (EDT)
At the danger of boring everyone to tears who does not have an acute interest in the subtleties of German syntax, a comment on Tibor Kiss' latest posting: > Stefan Mueller refered to a paper by K. Baker regarding the "Ein > Fehler unterlaufen ist mir noch nie"-data in German. The version I > know suffers from the fact that if the Subject occurs on the SUBCAT > (or COMPS), how can you block ungrammatical examples like (1)? > > (1) * ihr ein solcher Fehler unterlaufen ist noch nie > her a such mistake occured is yet never > > Examples of this type (where each element of COMPS is realized as a > complement of the fronted participle) cannot be blocked by Baker's (or > any other HPSG-) approach I am aware of. Tibor's point is of course well-taken, but I'm wondering how damaging this type of criticism really is. I believe Kathy Baker takes a step in the right direction by assimilating frontable nominatives to other complements. However, this only specifies necessary, but not sufficient conditions for frontability--and to the best of my knowledge, no one has yet been able to state satisfactorily what the operative sufficient conditions are. In other words, nominatives as "quasi-complements" in such constructions only share *some*, but obviously not all of the properties of more canonical complements. For instance, nominatives in fronted PVPs are required to be indefinite, as the following contrast from Haider 1990:96 illustrates: (1) a. Ein Fehler unterlaufen ist ihr noch nie. b. ??Dieser Fehler unterlaufen ist ihr noch nie. this mistake This does not hold for complements in general. So, if there are special conditions under which a nominative are allowed to form a frontable predicate with the nonfinite verb, it doesn't strike me as too strange if quasi-complements do not tolerate any other arguments along with them in fronted PVPs. I admit that I have no idea why this should be so, but as far as I can see, it is consistent with the data. --Andreas
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