A lexicalist account of argument structure: Template-based phrasal LFG approaches and a lexical HPSG alternative
Author: Stefan MüllerSubject Areas: morphology, syntax, lexical integrity, lexicalism, construction, passive, generalization, resultative construction, benefactive construction, English, German, LFG
This book appeared in 2018 in Conceptual Foundations of Language Scineces, No 2, Berlin: Language Science Press.
This book is an extended version of my contribution to the HeadLex 2016 conference.
This book is a contribution to the general discussion of the question whether argument structure constructions should be treated with reference to phrasal patterns as suggested by Goldberg (1995, 2006); Culicover and Jackendoff (2005) and others or whether lexical approaches like Categorial Grammar (Ajdukiewicz 1935; Steedman 2000), LFG (Bresnan 1982), HPSG (Pollard and Sag 1994; Sag 1997) and Sign-based Construction Grammar (Sag et al. 2012; Sag 2012) are more appropriate. In the absence of any fully worked out formalized phrasal proposals in Construction Grammar many arguments against phrasal approaches had hypothetical character (see for instance Müller 2006). This paper discusses recent approaches by Asudeh, Dalrymple, and Toivonen (2008, 2013), Christie (2010) and Asudeh, Giorgolo, and Toivonen (2014) in the framework of LFG, which can be seen as formalizations of phrasal constructionist approaches. The authors argue that certain arguments in resultative and benefactive constructions in English are licensed in phrasal constructions rather than lexically. Applying an old argument by Dowty and Bresnan to resultative constructions, I show that data involving derivational morphology suggests that valence information is visible at the lexical level and hence should not be introduced at the phrasal level. The conclusion is that analyses like the classical lexical analysis of resultative constructions by Simpson (1983) are the only option for lexicalist theories like LFG and HPSG.
A second part of the paper discusses active passive alternations in template-based approaches and points out that generalizations regarding c-structure are missing in the same way as they are missing in simple phrase structure grammar. Such missing generalizations motivated Harris and Chomsky to introduce transformations, but transformations are not used in LFG and hence the generalizations regarding active/passive c-structure pairs can not be captured. Furthermore an I show that cross-linguistic generalizations cannot be captured with reference to phrasal con gurations since languages di er in the way they actually realize resultative and benefactive constructions. It is shown that languages like German that allow much freer constituent order than English and partial verbal phrases are incompatible with phrasal views on argument structure.
In a third part I develop a lexical account of German and English resultatives and benefactives in the framework of HPSG and show how this account captures the commonalities between German and English despite the superficial dissimilarities between the two languages.