tailieunhanh - Constituent Structure - Part 24

Constituent Structure - Part 24 | 50 PRELIMINARIES 11 Near him Dan saw a snake. In this sentence the NP him is not dominated by another NP so the first cyclic node dominating NP him is the S node this node also dominates Dan. Dan is thus kommanded and preceded by him. 12 Such a configuration should trigger a condition C violation. However the sentence is grammatical. It appears as if any branching not just NP or S nodes above the antecedent blocks the kommand relation. The fact that kommand is typically used in combination with precedence is also suspicious. In English the trees branch to the right. This means that material lower in the tree is usually preceded by material higher in the tree. Consider the following facts of Malagasy a VOS language where the branching is presumably leftwards data from Reinhart 1983 47 attributed to Ed Keenan 13 a namono azy ny anadahin-dRakoto kill him the sister-of-Rakoto Rakotoi s sister killed himi. b namono ny anadahin-dRakoto izy kill the sister-of-Rakoto he Hei killed Rakotoi s sister. Under the kommand and precede version of the binding conditions we predict the reverse grammaticality judgments. In 13a azy him both precedes and kommands Rakoto so by condition C coreference here should be impossible contrary to fact. The unacceptability of 13b is not predicted to be a condition C violation under the kom-mand and precede either since izy does not precede 5 Nor is it a condition B violation since Rakoto is in a different cyclic domain NP than the pronoun. C-COMMAND AND GOVERNMENT 51 These kinds of facts motivate Reinhart s c-command or constituent command6 which eliminates reference to both precedence and cyclic nodes. I give first an informal definition here. 14 C-command informal A node c-commands its sisters and all the daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters etc. of its sisters. Consider the tree in 15 . The node A c-commands all the nodes in the circle. It doesn t c-command any others 15 M N That is A c-commands its sister B and all .