Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 3. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 29)
Csaba Ceglédi: On the Constituent Structure of Infinitives and Gerunds in English
90 CSABA CZEGLÉDI (45) [ V 1>[ c...]...] then some rather artificial mechanism is necessary to bar such a C position from the VPs of finite clauses, or, at least the C of finite VPs must somehow be prevented from being filled, in order to block the generation of ungrammatical structures like o o (46) *John [ ( : whoj saw e, This problem does not arise at all on the clausal hypothesis. 2.15 The Structure at LF and CS Let us assume that Logical Form (LF) is the level of representation where predicates are paired up with their arguments in propositional representations, and Conceptual Structure (CS) is a level of representation beyond LF where linguistic expressions are brought into correspondence with mental representations. On the simplest assumption, the syntactic counterpart of a proposition is a sentence. If predicate—argument structures correspond to syntactic representations in such a way that every predicate and each argument of every predicate is represented as a constituent in syntactic structure, then the mapping of syntactic representation onto Logical Form (which in turn is brought into correspondence with Conceptual Structure) is straightforward. This is the case on the clausal hypothesis, where there is a one-to-one correspondence between logical and syntactic subjects, and logical and syntactic predicates, with the consequence that there is no predicate without a corresponding subject either in logical or in syntactic representation. For concreteness, consider the following example (cf. Köster and May (1982)): (47) John, wants [PRO, to try [PRO, to date Mary]]. Every verb in (47) has a corresponding subject, so subject—predicate relations can directly be read off the syntactic representation. This is, I believe, a desirable consequence if the 'simpler the better' principle applies to the syntax—semantics interface. Under the VP hypothesis the single subject in (47) would be related to three different verbs, and the verb in (48) would not be related to any subject at all.
