Finiteness in Non-Transformational Syntactic Frameworks

I will discuss some aspects of the treatment of finiteness in its various facets given in (1) in the nontransformational theories of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG).1 Due to the way that syntactic information is represented in these approaches, it can be stated at the outset that finiteness is considered to really be a property of a clause. From this starting point, my purpose here is to show what other aspects of clausal structure or interpretation may express or interact with finiteness. This means that we must be careful to recognize the conceptual distinction between finiteness as a property of clause and its overt morphosyntactic expression (typically as tense marking on a verb) in a ‘finite’ morphological form – the clear distinction in (1)a/b. In this regard my contribution is similar to the contribution here by Nikolaeva (2005), though with a focus on the theoretical mechanisms that can allow one present analyses which are not forced to reduce finiteness to only one of the characterizations in (1). I will argue that non-transformational theories have as a necessary design feature the distinction between the surface form or position of a given morphosyntactic element and the grammatical information that that element expresses.2 The paper is organized as follows: in the rest of this section I discuss transformational and nontransformational approaches to clausal features such as finiteness, illustrating the more flexible relation between function and form that has been recognized explicitly in the latter group. In sections 2