Carl Pollard (pollard@ling.ohio-state.edu)
Wed, 29 Jan 97 11:25:57 EST
Except for PHONOLOGY, CONTENT, and CONTEXT, a case can be made for every feature being a junk slot, so you can always move stuff out of lexical entries (or phrasal types) into the relation definitions without changing the set of maximally specific sound-meaning correspondences. However, one must not lose sight of the fact that there are generalizations to capture having to do with notions of lexical identity, so that in some sense (or perhaps several senses), we need mechanisms for saying that two word instances are instances of the same word. Whatever mechanism is used to do this, it CANNOT be simply that both instances satisfy the same description out of some large disjunction of descriptions called the lexicon, unless those disjuncts themselves were crafted to reflect some linguistic notion of word identity. Here is an example. If we accept Abeille/Godard/Miller's analyses of French tense auxiliaries and causatives, then there are flat (argument-attraction/ argument-composition) analyses for sentences like
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