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This paper examines the apparently odd location of case-marking formatives found in the Pacific Northwest language, Coast Tsimshian. It first argues that the case-marking formatives are actually affixes on the preceding words, not prosodically-dependent words. Given this morphological analysis, a syntactic analysis is proposed that utilizes the 'informationally-rich' syntactic structure of HPSG. In particular, the analysis proposed uses EDGE features and chained identities between adjacent phrasal sisters to license the clause. This enables a simple analysis of the clausal syntax of Coast Tsimshian while still accounting for the wide array of facts surrounding the connectives.
The present paper proposes an analysis of the asymmetrical distribution of der, 'there', in embedded interrogative and relative clauses, respectively, in standard Danish. The analysis sets itself apart from previous analyses in integrating information structural constraints. We will show that the discourse function of the extracted subject in the clauses in question determines whether der insertion takes place in standard Danish. The analysis will further be shown to support the position that der in interrogative and relative clauses is an expletive subject filler, and that from an information structural point of view, the der in existential, presentational, passives and relative clauses is indeed the same der.
We explore the interaction of sentential negation and word order in Basque using a small experimental implemented grammar based on the Grammar Matrix (Bender et al., 2002, 2010) to test the analyses. We find that the analysis of free word order (Fokkens, 2010) provided by the Grammar Matrix customization system can be adapted to handle the Basque facts, and that the constructional approach taken in that analysis supports the integration of negation.
The use of hand gestures to point at objects and individuals, or to navigate through landmarks on a virtually created map is ubiquitous in face-to-face conversation. We take this observation as a starting point, and we demonstrate that deictic gestures can be analysed on a par with speech by using standard methods from constraint-based grammars such as HPSG. In particular, we use the form of the deictic signal, the form of the speech signal (including its prosodic marking) and their relative temporal performance to derive an integrated multimodal tree that maps to an integrated multimodal meaning. The integration process is constrained via construction rules that rule out ill-formed input. These rules are driven from an empirical corporal study which sheds light on the interaction between speech and deictic gesture.
This paper deals with expletives that are inserted into clauses for structural reasons. We will focus on the Germanic languages Danish, German, and Yiddish. In Danish and Yiddish expletives are inserted in preverbal position in certain wh-clauses: In Danish such an insertion is observed when the subject is locally extracted from an SVO configuration in non-assertive clauses. In Yiddish wh-clauses are formed from a wh-phrase and a V2 clause. If no element would be fronted in the embedded V2 clause, an expletive is inserted in non-assertive clauses in order to meet the V3 requirement for embedded clauses. In addition to embedded wh-clauses, declarative V2 clauses also allow the insertion of an expletive. In Danish the expletive fills the subject position and is not necessarily fronted. In German and Yiddish the expletive has to occur in fronted position. In contrast to Danish and Yiddish, German does not insert expletives into embedded wh-clauses. They are inserted only into declarative V2 clauses in order to fulfill the V2 requirement without having to front another constituent. In this paper we try to provide an account that captures the commonalities between the three languages while being able to account for the differences.
This paper investigates the information-structural characteristics of extraposed subjects in Early New High German (ENHG). Based on new quantitative data from a parsed corpus of ENHG, I will argue that unlike objects, subjects in ENHG have two motivations for extraposing. First, subjects may extrapose in order to receive narrow focus, which is the pattern Bies (1996) has shown for object extraposition in ENHG. Secondly, however, subjects may extrapose in order to receive a default sentence accent, which is most visible in the case of presentational constructions. This motivation does not affect objects, which may achieve the same prosodic goal without having to extrapose. The study has two major consequences: (1) subject extraposition in ENHG demonstrates that there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between syntactic structure and information structural effect (cf. Féry 2007); and (2) the overall phenomenon of DP extraposition in ENHG fits into a broader set of crosslinguistic focus phenomena which demonstrate a subject-object asymmetry (cf. Hartmann and Zimmermann 2007, Skopeteas and Fanselow 2010), raising important questions about the relationship between argument structure and information structural notions.
The syntactic and semantic complexity of the so-called numeral classifier (NUM-CL) constructions in languages like Korean (Japanese and Chinese as well) has much challenged theoretical as well as computational approaches. Among several types of the NUM-CL constructions, the most complicated type includes the so-called FQ (floated numeral classifier/quantifier) construction where the NUM-CL 'floats' away from its antecedent. This paper, couched upon the non-derivational VP-modifier view, shows that in addition to the grammatical function of the host NP and types of the main predicate, properties of the intervening expression between the FQ and its host NP also play an important role in licensing the FQ's distribution. In particular, we show that the FQ introduces new information in discourse and as default sets off rheme in the thematic structure. This functional analysis can provide an answer to several puzzling contrasts we observe in the distribution of the FQ.
Focus particles, secondary meanings, and Lexical Resource Semantics: The case of Japanese "shika"
(2011)
Japanese has two exclusive particles 'shika' and 'dake'. Although traditionally, both particles were considered to be exclusive particles like 'only', a recent proposal claims that 'shika' is an exceptive particle like 'everyone except' to account for the necessary co-occurrence of the negative suffix 'na' and 'shika'. We show that this negative suffix lacks two critical semantic properties of ordinary logical negation: It is not downward entailing, nor does it license negative polarity items. We show that both 'shika' and 'dake' are exclusive particles, but that 'shika' encodes an additional secondary meaning. The negative suffix only contributes to the sentence's secondary meaning when it co-occurs with 'shika'. We present an HPSG and LRS analysis that models the co-occurrence of 'shika' and the negative suffix 'na', and their contribution to the sentence's secondary meaning.
This paper presents a descriptive overview and a formal analysis of the syntax of pronominal arguments, pronominal conjuncts and bound pronouns in Arabic. I argue that Arabic allows first conjuncts to be null and that this is an instance of a more general pattern of zero anaphora that may affect pronominal arguments or their first conjuncts. First Conjunct Agreement and constraints on the distribution of zero anaphora are accounted for by a new feature sharing mechanism which allows a uniform treatment without appeal to the internal structure of argument NPs. I then argue that Arabic bound pronouns should be analyzed as affixes and present an analysis of their relation to argument structure and coordination. Finally, it is shown how constraints on case marking in Arabic coordination can be formalized. The analysis is part of an Arabic grammar fragment implemented in the TRALE system.
In this paper, we report on a transformation scheme that turns a Categorial Grammar, more specifically, a Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG; see Baldridge, 2002) into a derivation- and meaning-preserving typed feature structure (TFS) grammar.
We describe the main idea which can be traced back at least to work by Karttunen (1986), Uszkoreit (1986), Bouma (1988), and Calder et al. (1988). We then show how a typed representation of complex categories can be extended by other constraints, such as modes, and indicate how the Lambda semantics of combinators is mapped into a TFS representation, using unification to perform perform alpha-conversion and beta-reduction (Barendregt, 1984). We also present first findings concerning runtime measurements, showing that the PET system, originally developed for the HPSG grammar framework, outperforms the OpenCCG parser by a factor of 8–10 in the time domain and a factor of 4–5 in the space domain.