Multiple Inheritance and English Locative Inversion

One of the controversial issues in English locative inversion (LI) construction( e. g. Under the tree sat a woman) has been the functional status of preverbal PP and postverbal NP, i.e. whether they are a subject, a complement, or filer (topic) Based on the distributional parallelisms between the PP and NP on the one hand and an ordinary subject and filler on the other this paper proposes that the PP has a dual function as a subject and filler, while the NP also has some subject properties that the PP does not have These mixed functional properties are analyzed in the theory of HPSG expecially with the versions recently developed by Sag(1997) Manning and Sag(1999) and Ginzburg and Sag(to appear). This analysis claims that the LI construction needs to satisfy two general, independent constraints head-subject- phrase and head-filler-phrase. This position suggests that the English LI construction is an instance of the peripheral phenomena whose construction specific constraint is inherited from more general core constraints. (Dongseo University)