At First Blush on Tenterhooks: About Selectional Restrictions Imposed by Nonheads

Selection is one of the major mechanisms in formal grammar, such as HPSG (Pollard and Sag, 1994), and is used for two purposes which are usually applied in the same contexts: First, syntactic and semantic arguments are specified and their relation to the selector is indicated. This is usually expressed in terms of thematic role assignment. Second, the properties of elements that may be combined are restricted. When a verb selects its complements, it imposes both kinds of restrictions at the same time. If on the other hand the selector is a nonhead, as in the case of modifiers, the question of thematic role assignment is less clear. When it comes to complementizers which select a clause, only the second function of selection appears to be relevant. In this paper we will present evidence that all nonheads, including complements, can impose this kind of selectional restrictions on the heads they combine with. As a starting point we will look at PPs that contain a unique nominal