What does the type cat-sat mean?

Grammar Matrix
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1

Hi! Could someone please tell me what the type cat-sat mean? Does sat have anything to do with saturated? The matrix.tdl file contains the following definition:

cat-sat := cat &
 [ VAL [ SPR olist,
         SPEC olist,
         COMPS olist,
         SUBJ olist ],
  HEAD.MOD olist ].
2

Hi Leonel,

I am not fully sure and from this it looks like Emily wasn’t sure either. I thought the type stems from Elizabeth Nielsen’s thesis but I am not finding anything there explaining what it is for. There is nothing in Safiyyah Saleem’s thesis on argument optionality either. Maybe searching in commit messages could shed some light?!..

3

…here’s what I found in the commit history: Creating branch to test out cat-sat -- making certain things saturate… · delph-in/matrix@45742f0 · GitHub

4

…and even better: In matrix-core/matrix.tdl: · delph-in/matrix@0aaf9a1 · GitHub

5

Thanks for the sleuthing, @olzama ! I think the intent of this was as a shorthand to say “all valence requirements saturated”. However:

  1. It doesn’t make sense to include MOD in that (MOD not being a valence requirement
  2. I’m wary of using olist in this way … we’d have to make sure it interacts with the analyses of argument optionality so that ocons would really make sense where we’ve said cat-sat. For NPs in particular, I don’t think that’s consistent with how we’re using the feature OPT on specifiers.

I’m going to add an issue about this to the matrix repo…