334 Dik Bakker and Anna Siewierska
in those cases we will call them functional configurations. A configuration
may also be the description of a grammatical element, such as an auxiliary,
a demonstrative, or a tense suffix. In that case we will call them formal
configurations. The functional features (FncFtrs) are the primary μ opera-
tors relevant for the slot under consideration. They may be derived from
operators, functions and lexical elements of the Config, or they are directly
inherited from the FncFtrs field of the mother node. Examples of functional
features are Number, Tense and Animacy. Formal features (FrmFtrs) are
the auxiliary μ operators relevant for this slot. They may be derived from
the Config and the FncFtrs, be inherited from the mother node, or percolate
upwards from a daughter node. Examples of formal features are Case and
Finiteness. Finally, the Subcategorization (SubCat) is a template consisting
of nodes for the functional categories into which Config is to be split up.
The appropriate template is selected from the set of templates of the lan-
guage on the basis of the concrete value of the functional part of the node,
via more or less general rules. A template may also be inserted on the basis
of lexical information, typically from the head of the structure in Config,
for cases where the default node specifications would lead to the selection
of the wrong syntactic environment. This is an instance of lexical priority.
All these aspects together represent what in the standard model of the
expression rules are phase I and phase II. The templates and placement
rules of phase II are replaced by the subcategorizations and the functional
configurations of our model, respectively. Furthermore, formal configura-
tions and both feature sets replace the formation rules of phase I.
To round off this short sketch of the dynamic model of the expression
component, we give the complete derivation of a very simple sentence. It is
the expression of the underlying representation in (4).
(4) [decl E 1 :[X 1 :[pres e 1 :[smart [A] (prox pl x 1 :girl [N])ZERO,SUBJECT ]]]]
‘Those girls are smart.’
The first step in the expression process is the selection of a node that will
express the complete UR of (4). In order to cater for (4), this node needs to
have a more or less maximum representation of an UR for its Config field,
with variables for all relevant functions, operators and predicates and all
layers present. After its selection, the Config field will be unified with the
UR of (4), and the respective variables will get the corresponding values.
Example (5) below gives a simplified version of this top node before unifi-
cation with the UR and example (6) after unification. Elements in upper
case such ‘TENSE’ indicate free variables; lower case elements such as