5.5 Discussion
5.5.1 Syntactic Parallelism?
ask whether BO left?”.23The rule achieves this by making the content of the antecedent sign (recall that this will always be a proposition involving an illocutionary force relation) the ‘body’ ofMAX-QUDand one of the sub-constituents the parameter; i.e., it abstracts over this sub-constituent.
(Ginzburg & Cooper 2001) also discuss differences in the constructions needed for constituent readings expressed by repetition sluices as in our example or by wh-phrases, but the general principle is the same, and so we conclude our description ofGBAand come to the discussion of its merits and shortcomings.
It seems that as short answers to such interrogatives, both NPs and PPs are acceptable, regardless of whether the preposition is ‘case-marking’ as in (186-a) and (186-b) or ‘predicative’ as in (186-c).24(We have already seen examples of this kind.)
Now recall thatGBArequires categorial identity between short-answer and an element of the antecedent, through token identity ofSAL-UTTand fragment phrase. But what exactly is this ‘element of the ante-cedent’ that is onSAL-UTT? The value of this feature is specified informally in (Ginzburg & Sag 2001, p.301) as “the wh-phrase utterance associated with thePARAMSset ofMAX-QUD”. The data in (186) above suggest that one has to allow some degrees of freedom in what counts as the wh-phrase that is
‘associated’—either just the NP-argument of the preposition, or the whole PP—to explain the optional-ity and rescue the syntactic matching condition.
Interestingly, the condition of categorial identity seems stronger for free relatives, which otherwise have the same distribution asNPs:
(187) A: What does it depend on?
(
B: On what they decide B: ?#What they decide
While Ginzburg & Sag (2001) do not discuss interrogatives like the ones above, they do talk about interrogatives where the whole PP has been ‘pied piped’ (Ross 1967). They make two claims, both of which, however, seem to be too strong:
• “predicative prepositions [. . . ] do not appear in pied piping structures” (Ginzburg & Sag 2001, p.
196).
• interrogatives with pied-piped case-marking prepositions accept only PPs as short answers. (Ginzburg
& Sag 2001, p.301, n.9)
Example (188) is taken from (Ginzburg & Sag 2001, p. 196), where the question is marked as ungram-matical. My informants seem to disagree there; while they do find the question sounding rather formal they nevertheless do not regard it as ungrammatical:
(188) A: For whom does the museum run special tours? — (
B: For young children.
B: Young children.
The following examples are taken from (Ginzburg & Sag 2001, p.301, n.9) where the NP-answer is marked as ungrammatical; according to my informants again both variants of the answer are acceptable:
24Generally, my informants were in agreement that always both variants are acceptable, even though there seem to be prefer-ences, depending on whether the question is pied-piped or not; this might be explained with ‘syntactic priming’ effects (Branigan, Pickering & Cleland 2000). For example, (Levelt & Kelter 1982) found that subjects tend to mirror the surface form of the question when asked either “what time do you close?” or “at what time do you close?”.
(189) A: To whom did you give the book? — (
B: To Joe B: Joe
(190) A: On what does the well-being of the EU depend? — (
B: On a stable currency.
B: A stable currency.
Finally, we should point out that this optionality holds not only for short-answers, but apparently for sluices as well, as (191) shows.25
(191) A: Peter relies on Sandy.
B: On who? / Who?
To summarise, it seems that interrogatives which ask for objects of prepositional phrases do in general, be they pied-piped or not, allow both NP- and PP-short-answers, and that hence the syntactic matching condition must be relaxed accordingly.26 As already mentioned above, this is in contrast to German, where this optionality is not licensed.
(192) A: Auf wen k¨onnen wir uns verlassen?
(
B: Auf Sandy B: #Sandy
5.5.1.2 Sentential Complements
Sentential complements pose another problem for the syntactic matching condition.27 First of all, the
GBAhas to assume that “what” in certain constructions (e.g. (193-a) below) can be of category S[comp], to retain the assumed syntactic parallelism. Further, a number of verbs that take sentences as comple-ments accept both full sentences and sentences with a complementizer, e.g. (193-a).28However, if those verbs are used in an interrogative, a short-answer can only be a complement sentence, as (193-b) shows.
Hence, without further changes, the syntactic matching condition would overgenerate here.
(193) a. They believed (
that they will be reassigned they will be reassigned b. A: What did they believe? —
(
B: That they will be reassigned.
B0: #They will be reassigned.
25Interestingly, there seems to be an influence of register on optionality: if the, nowadays more formal, variant ‘whom’ is chosen, then the PP variant (“on whom?”) seems to be much preferred over the NP variant (“whom?”).
26Either through allowing flexibility in determiningSAL-UTT, or through allowing a map between PP and NP.
27Note that, as mentioned above, (Ginzburg & Sag 2001) and (Ginzburg & Gregory 2001) explicitly restrict the scope of their theory to nominal short answers. It will nevertheless be interesting to see how the approach could be extended beyond this kind of short answer.
28Why and for which verbs this is so is not yet well understood; cf. (Bolinger 1972) for an early study of this phenomenon.
However, there are other constructions besides short answers in which the complementizer becomes compulsory:
“It is commonly observed that in numerous syntactic environments a clause must appear with a com-plementizer. This set of environments includes at least sentence fragments, subject position, and the focus position in various copular constructions.” (Pollard & Sag 1994, p.125)
Since (Ginzburg & Sag 2001) analyse interrogatives as extraction constructions similar to focussed clauses, any solution for the mismatch in focus-construction would also solve this for the syntactic matching condition.
5.5.1.3 Category Mismatches
It has often been noted that some extraction constructions allow different syntactic categories in extrac-ted positions than in non-extracextrac-ted positions, or to phrase it more technically, allow the filler to be of a different category than the gap. These ‘movement paradoxes’ have been extensively discussed in the
LFGliterature,29with examples like the following:
(194) a. (i) That he was sick we talked about for days.
(ii) *We talked about that he was sick for days.
((Higgins 1973), quoted in (Bresnan 1994))
b. (i) That languages are learnable is captured by this theory.
(ii) *This theory captures that languages are learnable.
((Grimshaw 1982), quoted in (Bresnan 1994))
These examples can be directly adapted to the question-answer environment (as (Morgan 1973) already noted, see discussion above in Section 4.2).
(195) a. A: What did you talk about for days? — B: That he was sick.
b. A: What does this theory capture? — B: That short answers are weird.
Again, one can speculate about possible ways to rescue the syntactic congruence condition. First, one could locate this phenomenon in the operation of extraction, and somehow allow a filler to be an S[comp]
even though the gap wants an NP, coercing the S[comp] to denote a fact. This would capture the data in (194) as well. The second possibility is to relax the matching to allow an NP requirement to be met by an S[comp], similarly restricted to verbs selecting for facts. Lastly, one could argue that these kinds of complement-sentences are really NPs, which then however must be restricted not to occur in certain positions. We will not decide on any of the possibilities and simply note that examples like this don’t necessarily contradict the syntactic matching condition.
29See for example (Bresnan 1994, Bresnan 2001).
5.5.1.4 Short Answers to Adjunct Questions
We have already briefly mentioned in Section 5.3.2 Ginzburg & Gregory’s (2001) proposal for a treat-ment of adjunct questions. We noted that the extent of syntactic parallelism in these cases is not clear, but in any case less strict than with argument-questions. The following example showed this.30
(196) A: When did Joe leave?
B: At 2 o’clock / Yesterday / Recently.
This flexibility could be taken as evidence that for adjunct questions there is no syntactic influence at all, and the only requirement is semantic. While this might explain (196), it is not enough to deal with short answers to adjunct questions likes those in (197-a). As discussed at length above, in these cases semantic material seems to be ‘missing’ as well; function application of the question to its fragment answer is too simplistic to resolve the content of these short answers, and more powerful reasoning is required. We will return to this issue presently.
(197) a. A: Why did Joe leave? — B: Exams tomorrow.
b. A: How can I get downtown? — B: Bus number 14.
(198) a. (i) *John left exams tomorrow.
(ii) John left because he has to (take? supervise? ... do some unspecified action on) exams tomorrow.
b. (i) *You can get downtown bus number 14.
(ii) You can get downtown by taking bus number 14.