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Institute
Glue semantics for HPSG
(2002)
The glue approach to semantic interpretation has been developed principally for Lexical Functional Grammar. Recent work has shown how glue can be used with a variety of syntactic theories and this paper outlines how it can be applied to HPSG. As well as providing an alternative form of semantics for HPSG, we believe that the benefits of HPSG glue include the following: (1) simplification of the Semantics Principle; (2) a simple and elegant treatment of modifier scope, including empirical phenomena like quantifier scope ambiguity, the interaction of scope with raising, and recursive modification; (3) an analysis of control that handles agreement between controlled subjects and their coarguments while allowing for a property denotation for the controlled clause; (4) re-use of highly efficient techniques for semantic derivation already implemented for LFG, and which target problems of ambiguity management also addressed by Minimal Recursion Semantics.
This paper proposes an HPSG account of the French tense and aspect system, focussing on the analysis of the passé simple (simple past) and imparfait (imperfective) tenses and their interaction with aspectually sensitive adjuncts. Starting from de Swart's (1998) analysis of the semantics of tense and aspect, I show that while the proposed semantic representations are appropriate, the analysis of implicit aspectual operators as coercion operators is inadequate.
The proposed HPSG analysis relies on Minimal Recursion Semantics to relate standard syntactic structures with de Swart-style semantic representations. The analysis has two crucial features: first, it assumes that the semantic contribution of tense originates in the verb's semantic representation, despite the fact that tense can get wide scope over other semantic elements. Second, it allows the occurrence of implicit aspectual operators to be controlled by the verb's inflectional class, which accounts for their peculiar distribution.
This paper presents a general approach to verbal inflection with special emphasis on suppletion phenomena. The paper focuses on French, but the approach is general enough to apply to a wide variety of languages.
In the first part of the paper, we show that suppletion is not erratic: suppletive forms tend to always appear in groups, in definite areas of verbal paradigms. Our analysis is based on the observation of a number of dependency relations between inflectional forms of verbs (somewhat similar to rules of referral (Zwicky 1985, Stump 1993)). We define for each language a stem dependency tree based on these observations, which allows one to predict the whole paradigm of every verb in the language on the basis of a minimal number of idiosyncratic stems. We use the tree to minimize the quantity of redundant phonological information that has to be listed in the lexicon for a given lexeme, assuming that an optimal analysis of inflection should be able to derive all and only intuitively predictable inflectional forms from a single representation.
The second part of the paper attempts to integrate the analysis in an HPSG hierarchical lexicon. Morphological dependency relations are represented directly by mentioning a lexical sign in another sign's lexical entry. The approach to suppletion proposed in the first part is made explicit using a combination of online type construction and default constraints on the phonology of dependent signs.
Departing from the exhaustive indexation, syntax-driven approach to binding, we argued for an alternative, semantics-oriented rationale for binding principles. Under this new understanding of the nature of grammatical constraints on anaphoric binding, these principles are viewed as contributing to circumscribe the contextually determined semantic value of anaphoric nominals. This conceptual shift helps to find a fully fledged formal specification of binding principles with the HPSG lean description formalism where these constraints are entered in the grammar as part of the information kept at the lexical entries of anaphoric expressions.
I present a treatment of the Dutch R-pronouns in HPSG drawing on Linearization Theory as developed in Reape (1996) and Kathol (1995,2000). R-pronouns in Dutch are a set of locatives which also serve as pronominal arguments of prepositions, and as such may form non-local dependencies. Linearization and techniques of domain union, compaction and partial compaction allow for a straightforward analysis of these dependencies. I focus my analysis on the light R-pronoun er, and its iteration with two homophonous items, the quantitative and expletive ers.
Using the sign/construction distinction developed in Donohue and Sag (1999) and Sag (2001), I implement Kathol's notion of partial compaction in constraints on constructions of type prepositional-phrase, noun-phrase, etc. This places the phonological content of the R-pronoun or quantitative er in the DOMAIN list as a free agent, able to appear in the clause disconnected from the original selector. This use of linearization also permits a haplology rule to capture the idiosyncratic co-occurrence behavior that occurs when multiple functions of er appear together within a clause.
The Korean Light Verb Construction (LVC) contains a Sino-Korean main predicate (tayhwa-lul), a Light Verb (ha-ta), and semantic arguments of the main predicate (John-i, Tom-kwa):
John-i Tom-kwa tayhwa-lul ha-yess-ta.
John-Nom Tom-with talk-Acc do-Pst-Dc
'John talked with Tom.'
We defend a three-part analysis: (i) The subject of the main predicate is thematically controlled by the LV's subject. Evidence: Korean verbs assigning Accusative take an external argument (Wechsler/Lee 1996; Burzio's Generalization). Since the main predicate is Accusative, ha-ta must theta-mark its subject. Moreover ha-ta selects a non-stative Verbal Noun (VN) (cp. *kyumson-ul ha-ta 'humble-Acc do-Dc'); non-stative theta-structures typically take an external argument (Kang 1986). This control arises through complex predicate formation. (ii) Oblique arguments (PPs) are optionally transferred (cp. Grimshaw/Mester 1988) — but Accusative NPs are not. Evidence comes from relativization and pronoun replacement. (iii) Accusative is assigned by a mixed category Verbal Noun. This can be supported by adverbial clauses with VN's assigning Accusative without LV's. We review cross-linguistic evidence for both argument transfer (German; Hinrichs & Nakazawa; i.a.) and mixed categories (many languages, Malouf; i.a.) and show that Korean LVCs provide the right environment for both to occur.
One of the controversial issues in English stylistic inversion (SI) construction (e.g., Into the room walked a woman) is the functional status of preverbal PP and postverbal NP. Based on the distributional parallels among the PP, NP, ordinary subject and topic, this paper proposes that the PP in SI has a dual function as a subject and topic, while the NP also has some subject properties that the PP does not have. These mixed functional properties of the PP and the 'double' subject properties of SI are analyzed in the theory of HPSG, especially with the versions recently developed by Sag 1997, Manning and Sag 1999 and Ginzburg and Sag 2001, which posit the notions of the multiple type inheritance hierarchy and dissociation between the argument and valence structures. This analysis claims that the SI construction needs to simultaneously satisfy two general, independent constraints, head-subject-phrase and head-filler-phrase, as well as the construction specific lexeme-level constraint. This view suggests that the English SI construction is an instance of peripheral phenomena whose construction specific constraints are inherited from more general core constraints.
We present an architecture for the integration of shallow and deep NLP components which is aimed at flexible combination of different language technologies for a range of practical current and future applications. In particular, we describe the integration of a high-level HPSG parsing system with different high-performance shallow components, ranging from named entity recognition to chunk parsing and shallow clause recognition. The NLP components enrich a representation of natural language text with layers of new XML meta-information using a single shared data structure, called the text chart. We describe details of the integration methods, and show how information extraction and language checking applications for realworld German text benefit from a deep grammatical analysis.
(Ingria 1990)'s claims that both feature neutrality, where a sign acts in a sentence as though it simultaneously had multiple values for a single feature, and the coordination of unlike categories, where the features of two or more conjuncts differ from each other, pose fundamental problems for unification-based theories of grammar do not apply to constraint-based theories like HPSG.
New types can be introduced into the hierarchy of appropriate values for any given feature that directly represent neutralizations and coordinations. In this manner, feature neutralization and the coordination of unlikes are seen to be different aspects of the same problem: how to determine the values of a coordinate mother's features from those of its conjuncts.
This paper investigates a particular word order phenomenon in German, the occurrence of discontinuous NPs (which we refer to as the NP-PP split construction) in order to probe the division of labor between the syntactic analysis and discourse constraints on this construction. We argue that some of the factors which previous literature has tried to explain in terms of syntactic restrictions are in fact derivable from discourse factors. Building on these insights, we show how an information structure component can be integrated into an HPSG account of the phenomenon.