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stefan11 / german-sentence

Book about German Sentence Structure
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reviewer: DT as head feature? #30

Open stefan11 opened 5 years ago

stefan11 commented 5 years ago

p. 127 Does it make sense to say that a discourse topic is a head property of syntactic categories? (if the answer is no, the DT feature must be regarded a convenient technical hack)

I guess it is. We need it at the top level of the phrase. To do.

herrjasper commented 5 years ago

The discourse topic itself is not is a head property of a verb. What is encoded as a head property is the verb's preference for one of its arguments to be realized as a topic.

stefan11 commented 5 years ago

Yes, but the question is whether this should be a HEAD feature. Maybe this is a matter of taste. It is not really syntactic, isn't it?