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.