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A lexicalist account of argument structure
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Passives, again (p. 36) [via PaperHive@docloop] #310

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Regarding this part:

Asudeh et al. (2014 : 81) state that “The call to Benefactive is optional, such that the double-object rule is general and can also apply to non-benefactive cases.” If passivization and extraction are treated by declaring arguments to be optional, this also has to be reflected in the phrase structure rule in ( 21 ). The rule has to account for both verbs with a benefactive argument and normal ditransitive verbs. If the rule in ( 21 ) is supposed to rule out passives like ( 8 ), repeated here as (44) for convenience, the benefactive NP has to be obligatory. (44) * My sister was carved a soap statue of Bugs Bunny (by a famous sculptor). However, this would also rule out passives of normal ditransitives like (45). (45) My sister was given a soap statue of Bugs Bunny (by a famous sculptor). So, if the rule were responsible for normal ditransitives as well as for benefac- tives, all constraints regarding the obligatory presence of daughters would have to reside in the template since this is the only part that is different between bene- factives and normal ditransitives. The templates defined by Asudeh et al. (2014) contain semantic constraints and constraints relevant for argument structure mappings. Nothing syntactic is encoded there. So, either the authors assume that benefactives pattern like normal ditransitives syntactically in the speaker group that they examine and then there would be no need to introduce the bene- factive argument phrasally or there is a difference and then a special benefactive c-structure rule should be assumed that is incompatible with normal ditransitive verbs.

Ash Asudeh wrote:

I really think you may have gotten the wrong end of the stick here. First of all, it's a general assumption in current LFG that phrase structure rule elements are optional (see your footnote 2), as in Bresnan 2001, Dalrymple, 2001, or Bresnan et al. 2016. Second, we do not have to treat passive phrasally and in fact don't in the relevant papers, including AGT (2014). So I just don't see how this argument has any real force.

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docloop[bot] commented 5 years ago

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Stefan Müller wrote:

I am discussing this further down. My point is that Ida (2013) wanted the items in the c-structure to be obligatory. She said: >The distribution of benefactive NPs is thus very limited: it can only occur in the frame given in (5). This does not directly follow from the analysis given in section 3, and I will not attempt to offer an explanation for these intriguing facts here. However, it is perhaps possible to adopt an analysis similar to the one Asudeh et al. (2013) propose for the Swedish directed motion construction (Toivonen 2002). Asudeh et al. (2013) posit a template that is directly associated with a construction-specific phrase structure rule. (Toivonen 2013: 516) This means she relies on a fixed configuration. Your claims of optionality are incompatible with this. Either you have fixed configurations, then you need several of these, or you have freedom and your c-structure rules do not restrict anything, but then you need lexical constraints and we are home. =:-) --- - Toivonen, Ida. 2013. English benefactive NPs. In Miriam Butt & Tracy Holloway King (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG 2013 conference, 503–523. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

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