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Empty Categories in LFG Empty categories in LFG Judith Berman University of Stuttgart Pro ceedings of the LFG Conference University of California San Diego Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King Editors CSLI Publications httpwwwcslistanfordedupublications I am grateful to Christian Fortmann Gert Web elhuth Hub ert Haider Joan Bresnan Miriam Butt Steve Berman and Werner Frey for helpful comments and discussion This researchwas supp orted by the DFG Graduiertenkolleg Linguistische Grundlagen fur die Sprachverarb eitung at the University of Stuttgart LFG JBerman Empty Categories in LFG This pap er is concerned with the question whether there is any necessity and evidence for empty categories sp ecically traces in German Following the analysis of weak crossover in Bresnan b and Choi it is shown that the German weak crossover data can b e captured correctly if it is assumed that a topicalized constituent has to b e linked with an empty category in its lo cal domain its minimal clause only in the case of long distance dep endencies The empty category is indep endently motivated by a lo cality requirement on function sp ecication which is empirically supp orted by the fact that free word order in German is restricted to the lo cal clause It is further shown that the empty category cannot o ccupy the canonical p osition of the antecedent Instead it is claimed based on work byFrey that the sp ecier p osition of the functional category is the only p osition in which the empty category is licensed The resulting analysis not only accounts for the weak crossover data but is also shown to capture some restrictions on extraction and have implications for the structure of certain innitival constructions in German Constraints on cstructure In Bresnan b a sp ecic economy principle is prop osed to prevent the o ccurrence of unneces sary constituents in cstructure namely economy of expression Economy of expression all cstructure no des are optional and are not used unless required for expressivity or completeness To illustrate this principle Bresnan compares the topicalization structures of English and Russian based on King which are given in IP IP DP IP DP IP the old b oat Staruyu lo dku DP I DP VP my we I V DP pro dali sold e The old b oat we sold Staruyu lo dku my pro dali old acc b oat acc we nom sold pl While in Russian the syntactic functions are morphologically marked in English a congurational language the functions are dened structurally So in order to identify the function of a topicalized phrase in English it must b e linked to an empty category in the canonical p osition but in Russian a trace would violate economy of expression since the functional information is already given by the case morphology LFG JBerman Empty Categories in LFG In German syntactic functions are also morphologically marked so we exp ect parallel to Russian that there is no empty category in the unmarked p osition of a topicalized or scrambled constituent This is illustrated by the topicalization structure in FP DP F DF den alten Kahn F VP hab en DP VP wir V verkauft Den alten Kahn hab en wir verkauft the old b oat acc have pl we nom sold Following Haider simple sentences in German are analyzed as containing only one functional pro jection called FP whichemb eds a VP In the topicalized ob ject the old b oat is lo cated in the sp ecier p osition of the functional pro jection a p osition for discourse functions see section Evidence for analyzing topicalization sentences like without a trace comes from the pattern of op erator binding in suchsentences This is discussed in the next section Weak crossover The sentences in illustrate the basic facts of op erator binding in German sentences with clause internal topicalization a Jeder Wer mag seine Mutter i i i everyone nom who nom likes his mother acc Everyone likes his motherWho likes his mother b Jeden Wen mag seine Mutter i i i everyone acc who acc likes his mother nom Everyone his mother likesWho do es his mother like c Seine Mutter mag jeder i i his mother acc likes everyone nom His mother everyone likes Including noninsitu whphrases LFG JBerman Empty Categories in LFG d Seine Mutter mag jeden i i his mother nom likes everyone acc His mother likes everyone As we will see this pattern can be accounted for in terms of the analysis of op erator binding in Bresnan b which is presented in the next subsection Bresnan b In Bresnan b op erator binding is restricted by the socalled prominence principle Prominence principle A binder excludes from its domain any element more prominent than it The domain of a binder is informally dened as follows Bresnan The domain of a binder is the minimal clause or predication structure containing it formally mo delled as the minimal fstructure At each level of representation the relation of prominence is determined by prop erties sp ecic to that level These are given by the following denitions cf Bresnan a outranks if and b elong to the same fstructure and is more prominent than on the functional hierarchyor outranks some that contains b Syntactic rank a relation of prominence among expressed or unexpressed syntactic arguments based on the functional hierarchy SUBJ OBJ OBJ OBL COMPL a The linear order of and is determined by the right edges of their lexical expres sions reduces to simple linear order in the string whenever the corresp ondence between arguments and the no des that express them is onetoone b The lexical expression of an argument consists of any cstructure word or b ound form that lexically carries the semantic features of the argument together with all nonterminal phrase structure no des that also corresp ond to the argument Thematic prominence a relation of prominence among arguments asso ciated with the same argument structure inherited from the underlying semantic or role structure eg Dowty Jackendo Bresnan and Zaenen Alsina What results from these distinct notions of prominence are the following levelsp ecic instantiations of the prominence principle LFG JBerman Empty Categories in LFG Resulting domain constraints on pronominal binding i The domain of excludes any that outranks in fstructure ii The domain of excludes any that precedes in cstructure iii The domain of excludes any that is thematically more prominent than in astructure Consequently the eect of the prominence principle may dier at each level of representation Moreover crosslinguistic dierences in the distribution of op erator binding maybeaccounted for by assuming that languages observe dierentcombinations of the levelsp ecic constraints Bresnan b prop oses the following illustrativeweak crossover typ ology based on the domain constraints at fstructure i and cstructure ii English Palauan i ii German Korean i v ii Chichewa Kiswahili i Malayalam Hindi ii Choi The idea that op erator binding in languages like Korean and German is constrained by the dis junction of the fstructure and cstructure constraints is due to Choi She showed that this directly accounts for the p ossibilities of scrambling in Korean and German her German examples are given in a dass jeder seine Mutter mag i i that everyone nom his mother acc likes that everyone likes his mother b dass jeden seine Mutter mag i i that everyone acc his mother nom likes that his mother likes everyone c dass seine Mutter jeder mag i i that his mother acc everyone nom likes that everyone likes his mother d dass seine Mutter jeden mag i i that his mother nom everyone acc likes that his mother likes everyone Only in d is the b ound reading of the pronoun not available and it is only in this example that the pronoun is excluded from the op erators binding domain in b oth cstructure and fstructure In LFG JBerman Empty Categories in LFG contrast in b binding is excluded in fstructure but not in cstructure so the b ound reading is correctely predicted As a comparison of the sentences in with those in makes clear the pattern of op erator binding is the same in b oth scrambling and clauseinternal topicalization Thus Chois account will also apply directly to the latter This analysis succeeds only b ecause no trace of the scrambled or topicalized constituent is assumed If there were a trace in the canonical p osition of the antecedent in b and b the sentences would have the following structures a Jeden Wen mag seine Mutter e i i i i b weil jeden seine Mutter e mag i i i In b oth of these structures the pronoun precedes the right edge of the op erator so by it precedes the op erator and is therefore excluded from its domain in cstructure Thus with a trace the b ound reading would b e wrongly ruled out These results in fstructure follow only on the assumption that in i stands for not just the outer fstructure eg corresp onding to the DP no de of the phrase seine Mutter in but also all fstructures it may contain in particular the one corresp onding to the p ossessive pronoun seine The earlier formulation of the fstructure condition on op erator binding given in Bresnan a is less ambiguous in this resp ect it reads The pronominal binding domain of an op erator O is restricted to the set of fstructure elements that O outranks There is also no ambiguity in the formulation of the cstructure constraint ii due to the nature of linear orders That astructure also plays a role is seen by the p ossibility of backwards binding According to FrankLeeRambow and Frey backwards binding is p ossible only for sub jects this is illustrated bythe following sentences from FrankLeeRambow b a i Ich glaub e dass
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