Subsumption and equality: German partial fronting in LFG

In a previous paper (Zaenen and Kaplan, 1995) we developed a general LFG account of West Germanic sentence structure, concentrating on the order of nominal arguments in the Vorfeld and Mittelfeld. The account was based on the interactions between functional uncertainty equations, functional precedence constraints, and phrase structure rules. In Kaplan and Zaenen (forthcoming) we develop our account of the verbal complex. In the present paper we concentrate on another specific problem, partial VP topicalization in German. We extend our previous accounts by showing how subsumption relations rather than equality can model some important properties of partial VP fronting and also the differences in behavior of equi and raising complements in fronted and extraposed environments. We observe more generally that the subsumption relation in LFG and perhaps also in other constraint-based frameworks can provide insightful characterizations of asymmetrical phenomena in natural language that are otherwise difficult to describe.