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Dutch is well-known for the formation of verb clusters. A characteristic aspect of such constructions is that the order of the verbs may differ from the order in which they are selected. Across the Dutch language area verb clusters show different types of word order variation. This paper proposes a constructivist account of word order variation in Dutch verb clusters. Linearization is not modelled in terms of the GVOR feature, after Kathol (2000). Instead, it relies on the bidimensional phrase hierarchy initiated by Ginzburg & Sag (2000), which is extended for the analysis of constructions with verb clusters. This proposal accounts for the most common instances of word order variation in Dutch verb clusters, and it can be easily adapted to model a specific variety or dialect.
In a most recent corpus study on Persian, Faghiri & Samvelian (2014) found a significant effect of relative length in the ordering preferences between the direct and indirect objects in the preverbal domain corresponding to "long-before-short". They furthermore showed that the position of the direct object mainly depends on its degree of determination, and put into question the broadly accepted dual view based solely on differential object marking. In this paper, we provide experimental evidence in support of these corpus findings and further propose a unified account of ordering preferences between the two objects on the basis of conceptual accessibility.
Hungarian infinitival constructions have both mono-clausal and bi-clausal properties at the same time. The arguments of the infinitive behave the same way as the arguments of the finite verb do, but the non-finite verb has its own left periphery. After discussing the general description of Hungarian sentence structure and presenting an HPSG analysis for it – including a description of the connection between word order and scope order in the Hungarian left periphery – this paper presents an analysis for Hungarian infinitival constructions. The analysis lexically distinguishes the left peripheral arguments of the infinitive from its complements, and allows the infinitive and its left peripheral arguments to form constituents, while the complements of the infinitive are inherited to the finite verb.
Khoekhoe, a Central Khoisan language, has been claimed to have a clause-second position and topological fields similar to German and Dutch. The position in front of the clause-second position can be occupied by either the matrix verb or a dependent. We argue that monomoraic words are exempt from the general head-final order of Khoekhoe and suggest that this can give rise to discontinuous constituents, where second-position clitics intervene within the VP. We show that this idea provides a simple account of Khoekhoe word order variation and formalize it within a linearization-based HPSG analysis that has a wider scope than the previous Minimalist analyses of Khoekhoe and that is compatible with evidence from tonology.
The dispreference for subject case ellipsis in OSV sentences has been analyzed as resulting from a violation of a structural requirement on the position of bare subject NPs (Ahn and Cho 2006a, 2006b, 2007). In this study, we present evidence from an acceptability rating experiment demonstrating that OSV sentences containing a case-ellipsed subject exhibit acceptability patterns different from ungrammatical sentences violating a core syntactic principle on case assignment and that these sentences are judged acceptable when the subject refers to expected, predictable information in context. This evidence supports the conclusion that the dispreference for subject case ellipsis in OSV sentences is due to violations of probabilistic constraints that favor case marking for rare types of subjects and such violations can be remedied by non-syntactic information.
This paper presents an account of the position of sentence adverbials in Norwegian within a left-branching HPSG-like grammar design. The assumed left-branching structures open for a treatment of Object Shift in Norwegian as part of a wider phenomenon referred to as the Adverb Argument Intersection Field. The approach is compared to the standard P&P analysis of Object Shift and it is shown that the two approaches make similar predictions regarding basic clause structures with full NP arguments. However, while one in P&P is forced to assume a secondary phonological movement in order to account for the position of unstressed pronoun objects with regard to sentence adverbials, no extra assumptions need to be made in the proposed account.
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 word order facts of radically non-configurational languages pose a challenge to HPSG approaches which assume both that the surface order of words is the yield of the (tectogrammatical) tree and standard HPSG-style cancellation of valence lists. These languages allow discontinuous noun phrases, in which modifiers appear separated from their head nouns by arbitrarily many other words from the same clause. In this paper, I explore an analysis which preserves tectogrammatical-phenogrammatical equivalence, and accounts for the word order facts of Wambaya with an analysis based on non-cancellation. This analysis is contrasted with other approaches to discontinuous constituents and analyses of other phenomena based on non-cancellation. Finally, I explore the implications for current models of semantic compositionality.
This paper presents an overview of a proposed linearisation grammar, which relies solely upon information residing in lexical heads to constrain word order. Word order information, which encompasses discontinuity as well as linear precedence conditions, is explicitly encoded as part of the feature structure of lexical heads, thus dispensing with a separate LP specification or 'phenogrammatical' layer standardly posited for linearisation. Instead, such lexicon-originated word order constraints are enforced in projections, propagated upwards and accumulated in the compound PHON feature, which represents phonological yields in an underspecified manner. Though limited somewhat in generative capacity, this approach covers the key phenomena that motivated linearisation grammars and offers a simpler alternative to the standard DOM-oriented theory.
Japanese is often taken to be strictly head-final in its syntax. In our work on a broad-coverage, precision implemented HPSG for Japanese, we have found that while this is generally true, there are nonetheless a few minor exceptions to the broad trend. In this paper, we describe the grammar engineering project, present the exceptions we have found, and conclude that this kind of phenomenon motivates on the one hand the HPSG type hierarchical approach which allows for the statement of both broad generalizations and exceptions to those generalizations and on the other hand the usefulness of grammar engineering as a means of testing linguistic hypotheses.