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Floating affixes in Polish
(2006)
The morphosyntactic status of Polish past tense agreement markers has been a matter of considerable debate in recent years (Spencer 1991, Borsley & Rivero 1994, Borsley 1999, Bański 2000, Kupść 2000, Kupść & Tseng 2005). Past tense agreement is expressed by a set of bound forms that either attach to the past participle, or else float off to a host further to the left. Despite this relative freedom of attachment, it is often noted in the literature, e.g., Borsley 1999, Kupść & Tseng 2005, that the combination of verbal host and agreement marker forms a word-like unit.
In this paper I will argue that these agreement markers are best analysed as affixes uniformly introduced on the verb whose inflectional features they realise. Building on the linearisation-based theory of morphology-syntax interaction proposed in Crysmann 2003, syntactic mobility of morphologically introduced material will be captured by mapping phonological contributions to multiple lexically introduced domain objects. It will be shown that this is sufficient to capture the relevant data, and connect the placement of floating affixes to the general treatment of Polish word order Kupść 2000.
Within recent work on the treatment of resumption in HPSG, there is growing consensus that resumptive unbounded dependency constructions (=UDCs) should be modelled on a par with gap-type UDCs (Alotaibi and Borsley, 2013; Borsley, 2010; Crysmann, 2012b; Taghvaipour, 2005), using a single feature for both types of dependencies, rather than separate features, as proposed by Vaillette (2001a,b). Yet, authors disagree as to where exactly in the grammar the resumptive function of pronominals should be established: while Crysmann (2012b, 2015) advances an ambiguity approach that has pronominal synsem objects being ambiguous between a resumptive and an ordinary pronoun use, Borsley (2010); Alotaibi and Borsley (2013), by contrast, treat all pronominals, resumptive or not, as ordinary pronouns and effect their resumptive use by means of tailoring the amalgamation principle to potentially include pronominal indices. While their decision provides a straightforward account of McCloskey’s generalisation that resumptives always look like the ordinary pronouns of the language, it fails to capture the difference in semantics between ordinary pronominal and resumptive uses. In this paper, I shall reexamine the evidence from Hausa and propose to synthesise the approaches put forth by Alotaibi and Borsley (2013) and Crysmann (2012b), and propose that the potential for pronominal and resumptive function (including their difference w.r.t. semantics and non-local features) is captured by means of underspecification, yet the decision as to canonical vs. non-canonical use is made at the level of the governing head (Borsley, 2010; Alotaibi and Borsley, 2013). I shall argue that this division of labour is sufficient to derive the correct gap-like semantics for resumptives, maintains standard deterministic amalgamation, and, finally, provides an answer to McCloskey’s generalisation.
Syncretism in German: A unified approach to underspecification, indeterminacy, and likeness of case
(2005)
In this paper I address the phenomenon of syncretism in German and show how Flickinger (2000)'s approach to related issues in English can be adapted to provide a compact, disjunction-free representation of German nominal paradigms by means of combined case/number/gender type hierarchies. In particular, I will discuss the issue of case identity constraints in German coordinate structures, which has so far prevented successful application of Flickinger's proposal to German, and show how likeness constraints targetting individual inflectional dimensions of a combined type hierarchy can be expressed by means of typed lists that abstract out the relevant dimension.
I further show that current type-based approaches to feature neutrality are unable to combine the treatment of this phenomenon with the virtues of underspecification. I will then propose a revised organisation of the inflectional type hierarchies suggested by Daniels (2001), drawing on a systematic distinction between inherent and external (case) requirements.
In this paper, we report on an experiment showing how the introduction of prosodic information from detailed syntactic structures into synthetic speech leads to better disambiguation of structurally ambiguous sentences. Using modifier attachment (MA) ambiguities and subject/object fronting (OF) in German as test cases, we show that prosody which is automatically generated from deep syntactic information provided by an HPSG generator can lead to considerable disambiguation effects, and can even override a strong semantics-driven bias. The architecture used in the experiment, consisting of the LKB generator running a large-scale grammar for German, a syntax-prosody interface module, and the speech synthesis system MARY is shown to be a valuable platform for testing hypotheses in intonation studies.
In this paper, we provide a novel account of French causatives that crucially derives the core properties of the construction inside-out from the downstairs lexical verb to the causative verb, rather than outside-in, as is commonly assumed by argument composition (Miller & Sag, 1997; Abeillé & Godard, 1997; Abeillé et al., 1998). We shall argue on the basis of clitic trapping (Miller & Sag, 1997), as well as marking of the downstairs subject (Koenig, 1998) that the downstairs verb assumes a more active role than what is suggested by an argument composition approach and, conversely, we shall show that argument composition leads to problems with coordination and with en-cliticisation. The analysis we are going to propose combines an inversion analysis of the downstairs subject as a downstairs complement, accounting for scrambling and case marking, with an analysis of clitic climbing in terms of inflectional periphrasis (Aguila-Multner & Crysmann 2020).
The present study is concerned with the complex ways in which alternating relative complementisers in Coptic are employed as a morphological flagging device for unbounded dependencies in various types of relative clause constructions and wh questions. We shall argue in particular that the alternation in shape is locally conditioned by properties of the complement (TAME) and the antecedent noun (definiteness), which can be modelled via selectional features such as COMPS and MOD, plus the prosodic status of right-adjacent material (phrase vs. clitic). We shall show that all applicable conditions carry over from relatives to wh in-situ, suggesting to model the polyfunctionality of these complementisers in terms a systematic alternation between resumptive SLASH and in-situ QUE dependencies, modelled in terms of a lexical rule.
Furthermore, we shall discuss the status of unbounded dependencies and argue that the pervasiveness of resumption with relatives and ex-situ wh arguments can be attributed to the absence of gap-synsem on ARG-ST . We shall argue that apparent subject "gaps" in relative constructions are of a highly local nature, best to be understood in terms of subcategorisation for a finite VP complement. Finally, we shall show that the ban on argument gaps does not carry over to wh ex-situ adjuncts, providing additional motivation for maintaining a systematic distinction between these two types of extraction.
Clitic Climbing Revisited
(2003)
Presently, there is overall consent among researchers on Romance in HPSG (Miller and Sag, 1997, Abeillé et al., 1998, Monachesi, 1996, 1999) that bounded clitic climbing (CC) is best understood in terms of argument composition. Despite the fact that all current analyses of CC are based on the same core idea, individual analyses of this phenomenon differ.
In this paper, I shall propose a unified approach that will be applicable to CC in both French and Italian. The approach will be cast entirely in terms of valence lists, argument structure and slash, such that construction- or language-specific book-keeping devices can be eliminated. As a side-effect, this approach provides a more strengthened view of lexical integrity, in that morphological information, i.e. an argument's mode of realisation, will not be directly accessible for subcategorisation.
In this paper we discuss two contrasting views of exponence in inflectional morphology: the atomistic view, where content is associated individually with minimal segmentable morphs, and the holistic view, where the association is made for the whole word between complex content and constellations of morphs. On the basis of data from Estonian and Swahili, we argue that an adequate theory of inflection should be able to accomodate both views. We then show that the framework of Information-based Morphology (Crysmann and Bonami, 2016) is indeed compatible with both views, thanks to relying on realisation rules that associate m units of forms with n units of content.
Over the past few years, there has been renewed interest in the treatment of resumption in HPSG: despite areas of convergence, e.g. the recognition of resumptive dependencies as dependencies, as motivated by Across-the-Board (ATB) extraction, there is no unified theory to date, with differences pertaining, e.g., to the exact formulation of amalgamation (Ginzburg and Sag, 2000), or the place of island constraints in grammar. While Borsley (2010) and Alotaibi and Borsley (2013) relegate the difference in locality of gap and resumptive dependencies to the performance system, Crysmann (2012, 2016) captures insensitivity to strong islands as part of the grammar. Harmonising existing proposals becomes even more acute, if we consider the cross-linguistic similarity of the phenomenon, in particular, if we compare languages like Hausa and Arabic, which both feature island insensitivity to some degree, as well as bound pronominal resumptive objects and zero pronominal resumptive subjects, to name just a few of the parallels. In this paper, I shall reexamine resumption (and extraction) in Modern Standard Arabic (henceforth: MSA) and propose a reanalysis that improves on Alotaibi and Borsley (2013) in several areas: first, I shall argue that controlling the distribution of gaps and resumptives by means of case is not only empirically under-motivated but also leads to counter-intuitive constraint specifications in the majority of cases. Second, I shall show that the case-based account of Alotaibi and Borsley (2013) can be straightforwardly supplanted with the weight-based account I proposed in Crysmann (2016): in doing this, one does not only get a better alignment of case assignment constraints with overtly observable manifestations of case, but such an account is also general enough to scale from case languages, such as MSA, to languages without case, such as Hausa, or many Arabic vernaculars. Finally, I shall address case in ATB extraction and propose a refinement of the Coordination Constraint of Pollard and Sag (1994) that accounts for exactly the kind of mismatch observed in mixed gap/resumptive ATB extraction
In this paper, we study Old French declension, a system which exhibits the theoretically challenging phenomenon of morphological reversal (Baerman, 2007). Furthermore, the declension system of Old French only recognises a single exponent -s, which marks different case/number combinations in different paradigms, contrasting with the unmarked form. We show that reversal is only one of several syncretism patterns found in the language and propose that Old French declension is best understood in terms of two systematic syncretisms: a natural split between singular and plural for feminines, and a Paninian split for masculines that systematically marks the objective plural. Reversal, and other seemingly morphomic splits arise as a result of idiosyncrasy in the NOM.SG cell, comprising inflection class-specific s-marking, as well as stem alternation and overabundance. We provide a formal analysis in terms of Information-based Morphology (Crysmann & Bonami, 2016) that effortlessly captures the systematic splits, as well as the variation in the nominative singular. We suggest that the high degree of idiosyncrasy in this cell paired with the reduced frequency of overt nominative NPs when compared to objective NPs may serve to explain why the system was actually quite short-lived.