Mark Johnson (Mark.Johnson@xerox.fr)
Fri, 8 Sep 1995 13:43:08 +0200
> (3) What grade did he give every student capable of understanding his lectures about the > syntax of the Mongolian prepositional phrase with special reference to the > preposition BA #? > > > Pretty *good*, most people agree. This is odd if indeed the trace has the > position marked. Isn't there an extra assumption needed to make this follow? Something along the lines of: a node can only be constructed after all of the nodes that precede it are completed. This seems reasonable for nodes with phonetic content, but couldn't an advocate of the trace analysis claim that it does not hold for nodes without phonetic content? Of course, whether this is reasonable depends on how you choose to interpret phrase structure. If you regard it as (among other things) a representation of surface grammatical relations (the classical GB line, I think) then this is not unreasonable. But if you regard it as an abstract description of the temporal steps in a derivation then this proposal would be bizarre. BTW, I would like to make this crystal clear: I am _not_ advocating an analysis of WH dependencies in terms of traces! Mark
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