Author: Williford, Sean Michael Date: October 26, 1997 Title: Two issues in the syntax of Welsh noun phrases: an LFG approach Email: smw@csli.stanford.edu Format: PostScript Remarks: Stanford Linguistics Qualifying Paper, 46p. Abstract: Sadler(1997a) presents a partial description of Welsh noun phrases within the framework of Lexical--Function Grammar (LFG), focusing on the behavior of pronominal clitics and pronominal possessors. Sadler's analysis involves chains of modifiers adjoined to both N and \nbar, which exhibit internal ordering restrictions that are not accounted for. The first part of this paper addresses the question of ordering adjuncts in the noun phrase, proposing a TAG--like analysis of syntactic adjunction via the unification of syntactic features. This account enforces linear precedence orderings on chains of adjuncts by essentially extending the feature-- and unification--based principles governing f--structure to an aspect of c--structure. The second part of this paper examines the Welsh possessor construction, which is intimately connected with determiners and the marking of definiteness. I argue that in order to cleanly capture the competitive interaction between possessors and determiner heads, these elements must reference the same grammatical function in f--structure. This function, {\sc spec}, effectively replaces the functions {\sc def} and {\sc poss} in encoding information regarding definiteness and the posessor, reflecting a deeper semantic generalization regarding elements that restrict the reference of the head noun. The {\sc spec} analysis also accounts for the occurrence of demonstrative elements in a straightforward way, though it forces a reanalysis of definiteness as an emergent property of f--structures, instead of a property that is feature--coded directly.