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<Paper uid="C00-2096">
  <Title>Unscrambling English word order</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="663" end_page="666" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Intraposition
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The rules in Section 4 provide a reasonable account of simple extraposition (both left and right) from clauses. We now return to  7 I believe Betty is a fool.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> 8 Betty, I believe, is a fool.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> 9 Betty is, I believe, a fool.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3">  Suppose we use FRCP', with no LP-rules, to analyse (8). We will get, mnong other things, the phrases and part phrases shown in Fig. 1 (tile commas are treated as lexical items, so that 'Betty' starts at 0, the first comma at 1, and 'I' at 2, and so on). The first couple of steps are straightforward: 'a fool' results fl'om combining 'a' and 'fool'. It; has no holes in it, its extreme start and end are the stone as its compact start and end. Then 'is a fool' results froin combining 'is' and 'a fool', and again all the pieces are in the right place, so the extreme start and end are the santo as the compact start and end and the phrase is +compact.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> At step 3, 'Betty' is integrated as the subject of 'is a fool'. The result starts at 0, since that's where</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> 'Betty' starts, and is -compact, since it does not include all the intervening words.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> At 4 this -compact sentence l)ecomes the complement of 'believe'. The result is again -compact, since it fails to include the word q' or the two commas which at)pear 1)etween its start and end l)oints. The compact core is now the word 'believe', so the comi)act start and en(t are 3 and d.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> .At; 5, the VP 'believe Betty is a fool' combines with 'I' to produce 'I believe Betty is a fool'. The two commas then combine with this phrase, marking it as being parenthe.tieal and, when the second comma is included, finally marking it as +compact.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> Similar structures would be created during the t)rocessing of (9), with the only difl'erence l)eing that 'is a fool' would 1)e the first -corn, pact phrase found. Apart fl:om that the analysis of (9) would tm identical to the analysis of (8).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> 'i~hcre m'e two problems with this ai)l)roa(:h to sen-Ix'ames of this kind: (i) 1)ecause we obtain identical syntactic analyses of (7), (8) mid (9), then any (:Olnt)ositional semantics will assign all three the same interpretation. This is not entirely wrong: I cannot fairly say a.ny of these sentences unless I do believe that Betty is a tbol. But it is also clearly not entirely right, since it misses the diflbrence in emi)hasis. We will not discuss this any further here. (ii) be(:mlse we are not applying the LP-rules, we get rather a large number of mmlyses. Without LP-rules, we gel; a single analysis of '1 believe Bctty is a fool', having constructed 23 t)artial and complete, edges. 1,br 'Betty, I believe, is a fool' we get three analyses (including the correct one) having constructed 1.01 edges. Most of t, hese m'ise fl'om the t)resence of the commas, since we have to allow for the possibility that each of these (:ommas is either an ot)ening or closing l)racket, or a conjmmtion in a comma-sei)arated list of coltiunets.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> Others arise fl'om the fact that we have removed all the LP-rules, so that we are treating English as having completely Dee word order. Case marking still provides some constraints on what can combine with what, so that in the current case 'I' is the only possible sul)ject for 'believe' and 'Betty' is the only possible subject for 'is'. If we had been dealing with 19 Betty, Fred believes, is a fool then we would have had six analyses froln 107 edges, with the new ones arising because we had assigne(1 ~Fred' as the subject of %&amp;quot; and 'Betty' as the sul)jec~ of 'believes'.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> Clearly we need to reinstate the general LP-rule.% whilst allowing for the cases we are interested in.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> These cases are characterised in two ways: (i) some word that requires a sentence has oc(-urre(1 in ~ context where a :st)lit' sentence is available, and (ii) this word is adjaeeilt to a 1)arenthetical comlna. The statement of this rule is rather long-winded, but the result is to provide a single analysis of (8) from 66 edges, and a single analysis of (9) from 70 edges.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="5" start_page="666" end_page="668" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
6 ~more X than Y'
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Most (:ases of extral)osition in English involve sentences, lint there are a numl)er of other 1)henomena where items seem to have 1)een shifted around. Consider for instance the following examples: 20 Geo~ye ate more than six peaches.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> 21 Harriet ate more peaches than pears.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> 22 \[a'n, ate more pcaehcs than ,\]ulia.n.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In (20), &amp;quot;more' than si:r' looks like a complex determiner. How many peaches did George eat? More than six. The easiest way to analyse this is by assmning theft 'more' subcategoriscs for a 'thanphrase'. null In (21) and (22), however, the than-phrase seems to have become di@)inted. It still seems as though 'more.' heads a complex determiner, since (22) would support the answer 'more than Julian' to the question 'How many peachcs did Ian cat?' a We therefore introduce lexical entries tbr 'more' and 'tha'n' which look roughly as follows: athough (21) does not seem to support ~morc than pears' as an mmwer to 'How many peaches did Harriet cal'?'. The problem seems l;o be that NP complements to 'than' are actually elliptical (see below), and it seems to be harder to recover the elllpsed sentence 'More than she ate pears' than to recover ~More than Julian ate peaches' or era, ore than Julian ate'.  semantics...</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The entry for 'more' says that it will make a specifier if it finds a satmated phrase headed by 'than'. The entry for 'than' says that it will make a phrase of the required type so long as it finds sonm argument X. We know very little about X. In (20) it is a number, in (21) and (22) it appears to be an NP. In fact, as (Puhnan, 1987) has shown, the best way to tlfink about these examples is by regarding them as elliptical fbr the sentences 23 Harriet ate more peaches than site ate pears.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> 24 1an ate more peaches than Julian ate peach, es.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Other kinds of elliptical phrase are permitted, as in 25 Keith ate more peaches than Lucy did.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> or even 26 Martha ate more ripe titan unripe pcach, es. 4 We theretbre allow arbitrary phrases as tile argument to 'than'. All we need now are the LP-rules describing when arguments of 'than' should be extraposed. These simply say that if you are combining the determiner 'more' with a 'than'-phrase, then if the sole daughter of the 'than'-phrase is a nmnber  then it must not be shifted, and if it is not then it must be right-shifted.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> (i) {d, B, C} : A E det&amp;phon@A = 'more' &amp; cat@B = than&amp; dtrs@B = &lt;D&gt; &amp; (DEnnmorDeadj) 4Note that in this case the argument of 'than' is not displaced. null --&gt; - moved@ B (ii) {A, B, C} :A E det&amp;phon@A = 'more'</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> With these LP-rules, we get approl)riate structural analyses for (20) (25). We do not, however, currently have a treatment of ellipsis. We therefore cannot provide sensible semantic analyses of (21) and (22), since we cannot determine what sentences 'peaches' and 'Julian' are elliptical for (imagine, for instance, trying to decide whether 'Eagles eat more spar~vws than crows' meant 'Eagles eat more sparrvws than crows cats sparrows' or 'Eagles eat more sparrows than eagles eat crows').</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> If the structure of 'more peaches th, an pears' involves a displaced 'than'-phrase, then it seems very plausible that the stone is true for 27 Nick wrote a more elegant program th, an Olive.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> 28 Peter wrote a more elegant prvgram th, an th, at.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> This is given further supt)ort by the acceptability of examples like 29 A progrum more elegant than that would be hard to find.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="14"> where tile 'than'-I)hrase is adjacent to the modified adjective 'elegant' rather than to the noun 'program' which is modified by the whole phrase 'more elegant than that'.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="15"> Frustratingly, it just does not seem possible to reuse the lexical entry above for 'more' to cope with these cases. In (20) (25), 'more' made a deternfiner when supplied with an apl)ropriate 'than'-phrase.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="16"> For (27)-(29) it needs to make somettfing whicll will combine with an adjective/adverb to produce an intensified version of the original. We therefore need tile tbllowing entry: )lion ~more ~ subcat sign &lt; &gt; J| semantics...</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="17">  This needs a 'than'-phrase to saturate it, and once it is saturated it will combine with an adj (adjective or a(tverb) to nmke a new adj. There are two questions to be answered: should such a complex adj attpear to the left; or right of its target, and should the 'than'-phrase be extraposed or not? (28) and (29) show that these questions are intimately connected. If the 'than'-phrase is rightshifted, then the resulting modifier aptmars to the left of its target (28); if it is not, then the moditier appears to the right (29). This is exactly what is predicte(1 by (Willimns, 1981)'s suggestion that head-final moditiers generally appear to the left of their targets ( 'a quietly sleeping man') whereas non-headfinal ones apt)ear to the right ('a 'llt(t'lt sleeping quietly'). All we need to do is to make right-shifting of the 'than'-l)hrase optional, and to invoke Williams' rule., using the coral)act core of the modifier. Thus the compact modifier 'more elegant th, an thai,' fl'om (2{I) is not head final, since the whole thing is coral)act but the head, 'elwant' , is i1ot; the last word; the non-colnt)aet one 'move ch;gant ... than that' from (28) is head final, since this time 'elegant' is the last, word in the (:ompact core 'more elwant'. Hetme 'more clegant th, an that' tbllows its targe, t a.nd 'more clwant ... than th, at' precedes it. No new LP-rules are required, and 110 challg(}s 1;(1 th(} gellel:al rllle for locating moditiers are required.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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