Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T02:31:24.478Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Mixed projections and syntactic categories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2019

JOHN J. LOWE
JOHN J. LOWE*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
*
Author’s address: University of Oxford, Centre for Linguistics & Philology, Walton Street, Oxford OX1 2HG, UK[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

I explore the bases of a ‘distributionalist’ approach to syntactic categories, that is, an approach that makes distinctions on the basis of purely syntactic (as opposed to, say, semantic) criteria. I focus on the phenomenon of ‘mixed projections’, where a syntactic phrase appears to display properties of more than one syntactic category, as analysed within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar. I argue that of the three syntactic criteria called upon in the definition of syntactic categories within this approach, only one, the internal syntactic structure of a phrase, is a sufficient criterion for syntactic categorization. This leads to a more restricted definition of category mixing and implies a more restricted approach to categorization in general.

Keywords

gerundmasdarmixed projectionsparticiplesyntactic categories
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , 01 April 2020 , pp. 315 - 357
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I am grateful for insightful comments and criticisms to Andrew Spencer, to the audience at SE-LFG 20, 21 May 2016, in particular Louisa Sadler, John Payne, Miriam Butt and Jamie Findlay, and to the audience at HEADLEX16, 25 July 2016, in particular Bob Borsley and Dag Haug. I am also very grateful to Lama Alhelou for assistance with the Arabic data. This work was supported by a grant from the Jill Hart Fund for Indo-Iranian Philology at the University of Oxford, and parts of the work were undertaken while I was in receipt of an Early Career Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. All errors are of course my own.

References

Abney, Steven. 1987. The English noun phrase in its sentential aspect. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Alexiadou, Artemis, Iordăchioaia, Gianina & Schäfer, Florian. 2011. Scaling the variation in Romance and Germanic nominalizations. In Sleeman, Petra & Perridon, Harry (eds.), Noun phrase in Romance and Germanic: Structure, variation and change, 25–40. Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alsharif, Ahmad.2014. The syntax of negation in Arabic. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Essex.Google Scholar
Arnold, Doug & Sadler, Louisa. 2013. Displaced dependent constructions. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG13 Conference, 48–68. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Asudeh, Ash. 2012. The logic of pronominal resumption. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baker, Mark C. 2003. Lexical categories: Verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blackburn, Patrick & Gardent, Claire. 1995. A specification language for lexical functional grammars. Proceedings of the Seventh Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 39–44. Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Bögel, Tina. 2015. The syntax-prosody interface in lexical functional grammar. Ph.D. dissertation, Universität Konstanz.Google Scholar
Börjars, Kersti, Madkhali, Safiah & Payne, John. 2015. Masdars and mixed category constructions. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG15 Conference, 26–42. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Borsley, Robert D. & Kornfilt, Jaklin. 2000. Mixed extended projections. In Borsley, Robert D. (ed.), The nature and function of syntactic categories, 101–131. New York: Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bresnan, Joan. 1997. Mixed categories as head sharing constructions. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG97 Conference. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan. 2000. Optimal syntax. In Dekkers, Joost, Leeuw, Frank van der & Weijer, Jeroen van de (eds.), Optimality theory: Phonology, syntax and acquisition, 334–385. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan. 2001. Lexical-functional syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan, Asudeh, Ash, Toivonen, Ida & Wechsler, Stephen. 2016. Lexical-functional syntax. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell; Second edition. First edition by Joan Bresnan, 2001, Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan & Mugane, John. 2006. Agentive nominalizations in Gĩkũyũ and the theory of mixed categories. In Butt, Miriam, Dalrymple, Mary & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Intelligent linguistic architectures: Variations on themes by Ronald M. Kaplan, 201–234. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway. 1997. Null elements in discourse structure. MS, University of Konstanz. http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/butt/main/papers/nulls97.pdf.Google Scholar
Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway. 1998. Interfacing phonology with LFG. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG98 Conference. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Butt, Miriam, King, Tracy Holloway, Niño, María-Eugenia & Segond, Frédérique. 1999. A grammar writer’s cookbook. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on government and binding: The pisa lectures. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Dalrymple, Mary. 2001. Lexical functional grammar. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dalrymple, Mary, Kaplan, Ronald M. & King, Tracy Holloway. 2015. Economy of expression as a principle of syntax. Journal of Language Modelling 3.2, 377–412.Google Scholar
Dalrymple, Mary, Lamping, John, Pereira, Fernando & Saraswat, Vijay. 1996. A deductive account of quantification in LFG. In Kanazawa, Makoto, Piñón, Christopher J. & Henriette, de Swart (eds.), Quantifiers, deduction and context, 33–57. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Dalrymple, Mary & Mycock, Louise. 2011. The prosody-semantics interface. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG11 Conference, 173–193. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Dalrymple, Mary & Nikolaeva, Irina. 2011. Objects and information structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Drijkoningen, Frank. 1992. Derivation in syntax. In Aronoff, Mark (ed.), Morphology now, 48–68. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Fassi Fehri, Abdelkader. 1993. Issues in the structure of Arabic clauses and words. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.Google Scholar
Grimshaw, Jane. 1990. Argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Grimshaw, Jane. 1991. Extended projections. MS, Brandeis University.Google Scholar
Grimshaw, Jane. 2000. Locality and extended projection. In Coopmans, Peter, Everaert, Martin & Grimshaw, Jane (eds.), Lexical specification and insertion, 115–134. Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grosu, Alexander & Thompson, Sandra A.. 1977. Constraints on the distribution of NP clauses. Language 53.1, 104–151.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamm, Fritz & Lambalgen, Michiel van. 2005. Formal foundations for semantic theories of nominalization. ZAS Papers in Linguistics 27, 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haug, Dag T. T. & Nikitina, Tanya. 2016. Feature sharing in agreement. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 34, 865–910.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hristov, Božhil P. 2013. Pronominal case assignment in English. Journal of Linguistics 49.3, 567–611.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hudson, Richard A. 2003. Gerunds without phrase structure. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 21, 579–615.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackendoff, Ray. 1977. X̄ syntax: A study of phrase structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Ronald M. 1987. Three seductions of computational psycholinguistics. In Whitelock, P., Wood, M. M., Somers, H. L., Johnson, R. & Bennett, P. (eds.), Linguistic theory and computer applications, 149–181. London: Academic Press; Also in Formal Issues in Lexical-Functional Grammar, ed. Mary Dalrymple, Ronald M. Kaplan, John T. Maxwell III and Annie Zaenen, CSLI Publications, 1995, pp. 339–367.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Ronald M. 1989. The formal architecture of lexical-functional grammar. In Huang, Chu-Ren & Chen, Keh-Jiann (eds.), ROCLING II: Proceedings of the Computational Linguistics Conference, 3–18. Tapei: The Association for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing (ACLCLP). Also published in Journal of Information Science and Engineering 5 (1989, pp. 305–322, and in Formal Issues in Lexical-Functional Grammar, ed. Mary Dalrymple, Ronald M. Kaplan, John T. Maxwell III and Annie Zaenen, CSLI Publications, 1995, pp. 7–27.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Ronald M. & Bresnan, Joan. 1982. Lexical-functional grammar: A formal system for grammatical representation. In Bresnan, Joan (ed.), The mental representation of grammatical relations, 173–281. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Ronald M. & Zaenen, Annie. 1989. Long-distance dependencies, constituent structure, and functional uncertainty. In Baltin, Mark R. & Kroch, Anthony S. (eds.), Alternative conceptions of phrase structure, 17–42. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
King, Tracy Holloway. 1997. Focus Domains and Information-Structure. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG97 Conference. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
King, Tracy Holloway. 2016. Theoretical linguistics and grammar engineering as mutually constraining disciplines. In Arnold, Doug, Butt, Miriam, Crysmann, Berthold, King, Tracy Holloway & Müller, Stefan (eds.), Proceedings of the HeadLex16 Conference, 339–359. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Kornfilt, Jaklin & Whitman, John. 2011. Afterword: Nominalizations in syntactic theory. Lingua 121, 1297–1313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kümmel, Martin Joachim. 1996. Stativ und Passivaorist im Indoiranischen. Historische Sprachforschung: Ergänzungheft 39. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.Google Scholar
Lapointe, Steven G. 1993. Dual lexical categories and the syntax of mixed category phrases. In Kathol, A. & Bernstein, M. (eds.), Proceedings of the Eastern States Conference on Linguistics, 199–210. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.Google Scholar
Lowe, John J. 2015. Participles in Rigvedic Sanskrit: The syntax and semantics of adjectival verb forms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lowe, John J. 2016. Participles, gerunds and syntactic categories. In Arnold, Doug, Butt, Miriam, Crysmann, Berthold, King, Tracy Holloway & Müller, Stefan (eds.), Proceedings of the HeadLex16 Conference, 401–421. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Malouf, Robert. 1996. A constructional approach to English verbal gerunds. Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on the Role of Learnability in Grammatical Theory, 255–266. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.Google Scholar
Malouf, Robert. 2000. Mixed categories in the hierarchical lexicon. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Marcotte, Jean-Philippe. 2014. Syntactic categories in the correspondence architecture. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG14 Conference, 408–428. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Maxwell, John T. Jr III & Kaplan, Ronald M.. 1994. The interface between phrasal and functional constraints. Computational Linguistics 19.4, 571–590.Google Scholar
McCawley, James D. 1998. The syntactic phenomena of English, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Meier-Brügger, Michael. 2003. Indo-European linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mugane, John M.1996. Bantu nominalization structures. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson.Google Scholar
Musan, Renate. 1997. Tense, predicates, and lifetime effects. Natural Language Semantics 5, 271–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mycock, Louise. 2006. The Typology of Constituent Questions: A Lexical-Functional Grammar analysis of ‘wh’-questions. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Manchester.Google Scholar
Nikitina, Tatiana V.2008. The mixing of syntactic properties and language change. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Nikitina, Tatiana V. & Haug, Dag T. T.. 2016. Syntactic nominalization in Latin: a case of non-canonical subject agreement. Transactions of the Philological Society 114.1, 25–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nordlinger, Rachel & Sadler, Louisa. 2004a. Tense beyond the verb: Encoding clausal tense/aspect/mood on nominal dependents. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 22.3, 597–641.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nordlinger, Rachel & Sadler, Louisa. 2004b. Nominal tense in crosslinguistic perspective. Language 80.4, 776–806.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Panagiotidis, E. Phoevos. 2010. Nonargumental mixed projections. Syntax 13, 165–182.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Panagiotidis, E. Phoevos. 2015. Categorial features: A generative theory of word-class categories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Payne, John, Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K.. 2010. The distribution and category status of adjectives and adverbs. Word Structure 3.1, 31–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pires, Acrisio. 2001. The syntax of gerunds and infinitives: subjects, case and control. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland.Google Scholar
Pires, Acrisio. 2006. The minimalist syntax of defective domains: Gerunds and infinitives. Philadelphia: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pires, Acrisio. 2007. The derivation of clausal gerunds. Syntax 10.2, 165–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pollard, Carl J.1996. The nature of constraint-based grammar. Paper presented at the Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea. http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/L221a/pollard-96.txt.Google Scholar
Pullum, Geoffrey K. 2007. The evolution of model-theoretic frameworks in linguistics. In Rogers, James & Kepser, Stephan (eds.), Model-theoretic syntax at 10 (Proceedings of the mts10 Workshop, August 13–17, Organized as part of ESSLLI 2007), 1–10. Dublin: Trinity College Dublin.Google Scholar
Pullum, Geoffrey K. & Scholz, Barbara C.. 2001. On the distinction between model-theoretic and generative-enumerative syntactic frameworks. In de Groote, Philippe, Morrill, Glyn & Retoré, Christian (eds.), Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics: 4th International Conference (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, 2099), 17–43. Berlin: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rau, Jeremy. 2009. Indo-European Nominal Morphology: The Decads and the Caland System. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachen und Literaturen der Universität Innsbruck.Google Scholar
Ross, John Robert. 1967. Constraints on variables in syntax. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Ryding, Karin C. 2005. A reference grammar of Modern Standard Arabic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sadler, Louisa & Arnold, Doug. 1994. Prenominal adjectives and the phrasal/lexical distinction. Journal of Linguistics 30, 187–226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seiss, Melanie. 2008. The English -ingform. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG08 Conference, 454–472. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Spencer, Andrew. 2004. Towards a typology of mixed categories. In Orhan Orgun, C & Sells, Peter (eds.), Morphology and the web of grammar: Essays in memory of Steven G. Lapointe. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Spencer, Andrew. 2013. Lexical relatedness: A paradigm-based approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spencer, Andrew. 2015. Participial relatives in LFG. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG15 Conference, 378–398. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Struckmeier, Volker & Kremers, Joost. 2014. On the properties of attributive phrases. In Sleeman, Petra, Velde, Frank van de & Perridon, Harry (eds.), Adjectives in Germanic and Romance. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Toivonen, Ida. 2003. Non-projecting words: A case study of Swedish verbal particles. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tonhauser, Judith. 2005. Towards an understanding of the meaning of nominal tense. In Maier, Emar, Bary, Corien & Huitnink, J (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 9, 475–488. Nijmegen: Nijmegen Centre of Semantics.Google Scholar
Tonhauser, Judith. 2007. Nominal tense? The meaning of Guarani nominal temporal markers. Language 83, 831–869.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wescoat, Michael T. 1994. Phrase structure, lexical sharing, partial ordering, and the English gerund. Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session Dedicated to the Contributions of Charles J. Fillmore, 587–598. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society.Google Scholar