Extraposed Modifiers

Consider the sentences

Mary saw Denver flying to Chicago.
A jolly old man arrived with an armload of presents.
The man arrived whom John had invited to dinner.

Neither the seeing nor Denver was flying to Chicago, but Mary. It was the old man who had an armload of presents, not the arriving event. John had invited to dinner the man and not the arriving event. In each of these cases what seems as though it should be a right modifier to the subject NP is extraposed to the end of the sentence.

It is possible to interpret these cases as examples of metonymy, where the coercion relation is provided by the predication associated with the head verb. That is, normal syntactic processing would attach the postmodifier to the verb, and then that would be coerced to the subject, using the predication of the verb itself as the coercion relation. Thus, by normal syntactic processing, the seeing is flying to Chicago, the arriving event is with an armload of presents, and John had invited the arriving event to dinner. These interpretations will not satisfy the selectional constraints associated with ``fly'', ``with'', and ``invite'', respectively. Applications of axioms (2)and (3) thus coerce each of these arguments to the subject of the sentence. In the first sentence

see'(e,m,d)

coerces from the seeing e to Mary m, and in the second and third sentences

arrive'(e,m)

coerces from the arriving e to the man m.

Figure 4 illustrates this with the sentence ``Mary saw Denver flying to Chicago.'' Here the preposition ``to'' is viewed as making the NP ``Chicago'' available as a ``to'' complement, and the reader can deduce the composition axiom for sentence-level adverbials from the top branch of the proof graph.

  

Figure 4: Parse of ``Mary saw Denver flying to Chicago.''

A similar analysis can be used to correct for incorrect prepositional phrase attachments. In

I saw the man in the park with the telescope.

if the park is incorrectly identified as the logical subject of ``with'', the in and see relations can be used to coerce it to the seeing event. Instead of the park being with the telescope, the seeing event by me of a man in the park is with the telescope.

Preposed right modifiers of nouns can be handled in the same way. In

Of all the options mentioned, several are viable.

the preposed PP ``Of all the options mentioned'' is first attached as a modifier to ``viable''. Metonymic interpretation then uses the viability relation itself to coerce the attachment onto ``several''. More precisely, suppose the logical form includes the predication viable'(e,x), where x is the typical example of the several options. The explicit logical subject of the predicate of is first e. The predication viable'(e,x) is then used as a coercion relation to coerce the logical subject of of from e to x.

Sometimes the complement of an adjective used prenominally appears as the noun complement, as in

a similar book to that.

This can also be viewed as an example of metonymy. The complement ``to that'' is taken first as a property of the book b.

Syn(``to that'',e,p,b,n,y,n)

This is then decomposed by the metonymy axiom (2) into

Syn(``to that'',e,p,e₁,n,y₁,n $) \& rel(e_{1},b)$

The first conjunct eventually bottoms out in the predication to'(e,e₁,y₁), among others. The second conjunct, the coercion relation, is established using similar'(e,b,y₂). Finally y₁ and y₂ are identified using the axiom

$(\forall \,e,x,y) similar'(e,x,y) \, \supset \,(\exists \,e_{1}) to'(e_{1},e,y)$

relating similar to the preposition used to signal its second argument.

A greatly abbreviated proof graph for this interpretation is shown in Figure 5. I have ignored the determiner and used dots to avoid the details of composition within NPs.

  

Figure 5: Parse of ``a similar book to that''

In languages that have a freer word order than English has, many of the elements displaced from their unmarked position can be treated similarly.