LINGUIST List 6.656

Tue 09 May 1995

Sum: NP syntax, Dissimilation rules

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1. David Scarratt, NP syntax
2. , Summary: dissimilation rules

Some months ago I posted a query regarding complements and adjuncts in
noun phrases. Sincerest apologies for the delay, especially to those
who requested this summary. I've had trouble accessing the network these
last couple of months, for various reasons.

The original query:
) Does anyone know of any recent or forthcoming work on the syntax of
) Noun Phrases, in particular with reference to the
) complement/non-complement/there's-no-such-distinction status of
) modifiers within NP. I'm principally interested in English, but
) references to work on other languages are also welcome.

Thanks to:
 annabellinguistics.ucl.ac.uk (Annabel Cormack)
 richard_de_armondsfu.ca (Richard C. DeArmond)
 ufrieses.unizh.ch (Udo Fries)
 Gregory.Grefenstettexerox.fr (Gregory Grefenstette)
 ingriabbn.com (Bob Ingria)
 Ruth.M.Lanouettelawrence.edu (Ruth Lanouette)
 jmartinhusc.harvard.edu (Javier Martin-Gonzalez)
 pmillerulb.ac.be (Philip H. Miller)
 amunnshowme.missouri.edu (Alan Munn)
 cschutzeMIT.EDU (Carson T Schutze)

References:
===========
Steven Abney 1986. Functional Elements and Licensing.
 Unpublished ms. MIT.

Steven Abney 1987. The English NP in its Sentential Aspect.
 MIT dissertation.

Christa Bhatt 1990. _Die syntaktische Struktur der Nominalphrase im Deutschen_.
 Tuebingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.

Naoki Fukui 1986. A Theory of Category Projection and its Applications.
 MIT dissertation.

Jane Grimshaw 1991. _Argument Structure_. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 18.
 MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.

R. Ingria and L. George 1993. ``Adjectives, Nominals, and the Status of
 Arguments'', in James Pustejovsky, ed., {\it Semantics and the Lexicon},
 Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, the Netherlands, pp. 107--127.

Andreas H. Jucker 1992. Social Stylistics. Syntactic Variation in British
 Newspapers. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Philip H. Miller 1992. Clitics and Constituents in Phrase Structure Grammar.
 New York: Garland. (Ph D dissertation, University of Utrecht, 1991).
 [``The section interesting you is 3.2, pp78-88.'']

Alan Munn 1995. ``The Possessor that Stayed Close to Home'', in Vida
 Samiian (ed.), _Proceedings of the Western Conference on Linguistics_.
 [available at URL ftp://showme.missouri.edu/pub/amunn/wecol94.ps]

Beatrice Warren 1978. "Semantic Patterns of Noun-Noun Compounds". Acta
 Universitatis Gothoburgensis, Gothenburg Studies in English, 41,
 Goteburg, Sweden.

Other information:
==================
Annabel Cormack (annabellinguistics.ucl.ac.uk) writes:
) You might like to look at a working paper (not without some errors) by
) myself and Breheny in UCL Working papers in Linguistcs no6, 1994. Mainly for
) its discussion of the status of adjuncts.
) Annabel Cormack

Ruth Lanouette (Ruth.M.Lanouettelawrence.edu), who suggested the Bhatt
reference above, writes:
) I did write one article in which I discussed Bhatt's
) analysis of NP's, and it is in English. I'd be happy to send
) it to you (electronically or on paper), though with the caveat
) that I no longer am happy with what I said.

Javier Martin-Gonzalez (jmartinhusc.harvard.edu) writes:
) There's a person at Universidad de Sevilla (Spain) who is about to finish
) his dissertation on the syntactic analysis of NPs. His name is Javier
) Tamayo-Morillo, and his e-mail is jtamayosevax4.us.es .
[I haven't received a reply to my attempts to contact the latter Javier. DS]

Thanks again to all those who responded.
--
Dave Scarratt
davidscse.unsw.edu.au

A week or so, I posted a query concerning an article by Morris Halle in a
recent issue of Linguistic Inquiry, in which he proposed treating
dissimilation processes by the use of alpha variable rules. This appeared
to be something of a return to the way rules were formulated in SPE.

I received two replies, from Don Churma (00dgchurmabsuvc.bsu.edu) and Bill
Idsardi (idsardistrauss.udel.edu). Both agreed that an alternative
analysis--one more in the spirit of autosegmental phonology--is that
dissimilatory processes should be treated as delinking, followed by some
other process. Candidates for the "other process" include default feature
value instantiation, spreading (from another segment, presumably), and
copying (which differs from spreading).

Some partial references: Bill Poser (WCCFL paper), David Odden (ESCOL
paper), Inkelas and Cho (Language, 1993).