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Remarks on sluicing
(2011)
Sluicing is widely regarded as requiring an analysis via deletion operations, a potentially problematic conclusion for non-transformational frameworks like HPSG. We examine critically and reassess the motivation for a deletion analysis of Sluicing, offering cross-linguistic and language-internal evidence in support of a fundamentally semantic constructional alternative like the one proposed by Ginzburg and Sag (2000).
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.
My objective here is to assess the relevance of information structural notions for analyzing subject inversion in French. Subject inversion is not a unified phenomenon. In fact, there are three distinct constructions featuring an inverted subject. I show that the sentences do not have the same informational potential (the type of focus-ground articulation they are compatible with) depending on the construction they abide by. I propose a contextual factor – the informational solidarity between the verb and its first argument – to account for those differences. Then, I show that the three constructions share a common feature that pertains to a completely different dimension: the perspective chosen to describe the situation. I adopt Langacker's notion of absolute construal to characterize it. Finally, I present another common feature: the blocking of the referential anchoring of the referent of indefinite and partitive NPs.
Reanalysis of semantically required dependents as complements in the Chinese "ba"-construction
(2011)
The paper aims at a formulation of semantic constraints on the produc- tivity of the Chinese ba-construction and their representation at the syntax-semantics interface. It builds on the observation that requirements on the surface form of the construction may be altered by the choice of the verb. I propose that the semantics of the ba-construction can be treated in terms of a scalar constraint: a ba-sentence must come with a scale and a difference value that holds of the described event. The satisfaction of this constraint largely relies on the lexical semantics of the sentence. Not all verbs are inherently associated with scalar relations; those that are not must combine with an additional dependent which satisfies the scale requirement. Due to the obligatory presence of the additional dependent for some verbs, it is reanalyzed as a complement of ba: being optional on their level of combination with the verb, it becomes obligatory once the verb is used in the ba-construction.
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.
Much recent work on coordination in the HPSG framework seeks to deal with some of the most intractable issues this phenomenon poses for a constraint-based phrase structure architecture by appealing to the linearization mechanism introduced in Reape 1993. The research in question utilizes the mismatch between linear phonological sequences on the one hand and phrasal configuration on the other to underwrite a particular interpretation of ellipsis in which multiple structural objects with identical or near-identical descriptions are mapped to a single dom-object token. This mapping apparently allows a variety of problematic cases, such as right node raising, dependent cluster coordination, and unlike category coordination to be reinterpreted as instances of ordinary coordination in which structurally present elements receive no prosodic expression, creating the impression that strings which do not correspond to constituents of the same category have nonetheless been conjoined or disjoined. I argue in this paper that such linearization-based ellipsis (LBE) analyses, though plausible when confined to a narrow class of simplest-case data, prove untenable in the face of data sets in which the LBE approach must account for the interaction of nonconstituent coordination and quantification or symmetric predication, symmetrical modification of nominal heads, and a large and varied class of unlike category coordinations that do not admit of any ellipsis-based solutions. I show in addition that various objections offered in the LBE literature to categorial grammar treatments of the problems posed by noncanonical coordinations do not take into account techical resources available to CG which permit straightforward and unproblematic solutions to these problems. One must conclude that despite the general poplularity of LBE accounts of conjunction, there is at the moment no satisfactory HPSG treatment of noncanonical coordinations.
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.
English Binominal NPs (BNP) (e.g., a hell of a problem) are of empirical and theoretical interest due to their complex syntactic and semantic properties. In this paper, we review some basic properties of the BNP construction, focusing on its headedness, semantic relations, and the role of the preposition of. We argue that these properties suggest an account in the spirit of construction grammar. In particular, we show that English BNP is a nominal juxtaposition construction whose special syntactic constraints are linked to semantic relations like a subject-predicate relation.
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.