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Two Siberian languages, Tundra Nenets and Tundra Yukaghir, do not obey strong island constraints in questioning: any sub-constituent of a relative or adverbial clause can be questioned. We argue that this has to do with how focusing works in these languages. The focused sub-constituent remains in situ, but there is abundant morphosyntactic evidence that the focus feature is passed up to the head of the clause. The result is the formation of a complex focus structure in which both the head and non head daughter are overtly marked as focus, and they are interpreted as a pairwise list such that the focus background is applicable to this list, but not to other alternative lists.
The embedded verb of so-called object-control verbs in Kavalan must be affixed with the causative marker pa-. It is argued that such control predicates in Kavalan like pawRat 'force' feature an internal Logophoric Center in its complement clause and this property of logophoricity is absent in other control predicates. Moreover, control predicates that do not take a causativized verb complement like paska 'try' and tud 'teach' are restructuring predicates and are thus devoid of a Fin head in their complement that can be linked to an internal Logophoric Center. In contrast, the TP and CP of the complement of pawRat 'force'-type predicates are still projected and active. The causativization of the embedded verb in a control sentence cannot be explained by a purely syntactic or semantic account of obligatory control. Instead, a comprehensive and satisfactory explanation for Kavalan obligatory control must take into account how event structure and Logophoric Center are encoded in Syntax.
In this paper I present an account for the lexical passive Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) in Korean. Regarding the issue of how the arguments of an SVC are realized, I propose two hypotheses: i) Korean SVCs are broadly classified into two types, subject-sharing SVCs where the subject is structure-shared by the verbs and index-sharing SVCs where only indices of semantic arguments are structure-shared by the verbs, and ii) a semantic argument sharing is a general requirement of SVCs in Korean. I also argue that an argument composition analysis can accommodate such the new data as the lexical passive SVCs in a simple manner compared to other alternative derivational analyses.
Deconstructing SYNtax
(2014)
There are at least two distinct ways of conceiving of syntax: the set of rules that enable speakers and listeners to combine the meaning of expressions (compositional syntax), or the set of formal constraints on the combinations of expressions (formal syntax). The question that occupies us in this paper is whether all languages include a significant formal syntax component or whether there are languages in which most syntactic rules are exclusively compositional. Our claims are (1) that Oneida (Northern Iroquoian) has almost no formal syntax component and is very close to a language that includes only a compositional syntax component and (2) that the little formal syntax Oneida has does not require making reference to syntactic features.
This paper presents a brief overview of idiomatic expressions in the Norwegian LFG grammar NorGram and shows how the rich lexical information of the LFG grammar can be reused in an HPSG-like grammar with a radically different approach to alternating argument frames. Rather than accounting for idioms by means of special idiom lexical entries, which is the standard approach in LFG and HPSG, a constructional approach is taken where the verbs of the idioms are left underspecified with regard to whether they are idioms or not. A hierarchy of subconstruction types is assumed, which for each piece of evidence provided by the words and rules of the sentence, narrows down the possible frames of the verb to just one.
Degree adverbs in Mauritian
(2014)
In Mauritian, degree words exhibit an extreme syntactic polymorphism in combining with all major categories. When two forms coexist, *mari* ('very') and *boukou* ('a lot'), they select the predicate they modify on semantic more than syntactic criteria. We analyse degree words as adverbs with a double syntactic function: as complements in postverbal position (since they can by themselves trigger the short verbal form) and as adjuncts otherwise. We extend our analysis to inequality comparatives, *pli / plis* ('more') and *mwin / mwins* ('less') which are also polymorphic, with a double life as adjunct and complement.
We examine noun phrases and predication in Khoekhoe, a Central Khoisan language, arguing that members of all open word classes can function equally and without derivation as predicates, and that predicative use is primary and referential use is derived syntactically by relativization. We then present a formal HPSG analysis, in which members of all open word classes enter the syntax as predicates and in which all argument NPs are derived in a uniform manner as projections of pronominal elements, modified by relative clauses, building on Sag's (1997) analysis of English relative clauses. We will then argue that, additionally, DPs may project directly to clauses, yielding a second predication structure.
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.
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.
I argue for a new type of non-standard constituent in German; a modifier-collocational-cluster. This type of cluster combines (i) a modifier and (ii) a PP from a light-verb construction (or a Funktionsverbgefüge (FVG) as they are known in German) or a bare noun. Such strings are found in German in initial (prefield) position in certain cases of apparent multiple fronting. We are dealing with a syntax-semantics mismatch here since the modifier does not semantically modify the element with which it can first syntactically combine. I show that the modifier is a collocate of both its co-prefield element but also of the verb. I propose a schema which lexically licenses the building of such clusters and I show how we can encode information about what I refer to as collocational selection in the lexical entries of the type of lexemes involved in these multi-word strings. The analysis can be seen as lexical but does not require lexical storage of phrasal elements.
So-called ''Exhaustive Conditionals'' (ECs, also known as ''Unconditionals'') have been an important focus of recent research. We develop an HPSG analysis of governed ECs (e.g. 'no matter how intelligent the students are ...'), sketch an approach to ungoverned ECs (e.g. 'however intelligent the students are...'), and evaluate three possible analyses of reduced ECs (e.g. 'no matter how intelligent the students ...', 'however intelligent the students...').
Much discussion of the comparative correlative construction exemplified by The more I read, the more I understand has been concerned with how much cross–linguistic variation there is in this area. Culicover and Jackendoff (1999) suggest that there is considerable variation, but Den Dikken (2005) suggests with data from a variety of languages that the variation is quite limited. Modern Standard Arabic has a comparative correlative construction which is quite different from Engish and the other languages that Den Dikken considers, suggesting that there is more variation in this domain than he assumes. However, it is not difficult to provide an analysis of the construction and other related constructions within the HPSG framework.
In Dutch V-final clauses the verbs tend to form a cluster in which the main verb is separated from its syntactic arguments by one or more other verbs. In HPSG the link between the main verb and its arguments is canonically modeled in terms of argument inheritance, also known as argument composition or generalized raising. When applied to Dutch, this treatment yields a number of problems, making incorrect predictions about the interaction with the binding principles and the passive lexical rule. To repair them this paper proposes an alternative, in which subject raising and complement raising are modeled in terms of different devices. More specifically, while subject raising is modeled in terms of lexical constraints, as for English, complement raising is modeled in terms of a more general constraint on headed phrases. This new constraint not only accounts for complement raising out of verbal complements, it also deals with complement raising out of adjectival and adpositional complements, as well as with complement raising out of PP adjuncts and subject NPs. It is, hence, a rather powerful device. To prevent overgeneration we add a number of constraints. For Dutch, the relevant constraints block complement raising out of CPs, V-initial VPs and P-initial PPs. For English, the Empty COMPS Constraint is sufficient to block complement raising entirely.
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.
This paper presents a unified approach to multiple nominative and accusative constructions in Korean. We identify 16 semantic relations holding between two consecutive NPs in multiple case marking constructions, and propose each semantic relation as a licensing condition on double case marking. We argue that the multiple case marking constructions are merely the sequences of double case marking, which are formed by dextrosinistrally sequencing the pairs of the same-case marked NPs of same or different type. Some appealing consequences of this proposal include a new comprehensive classification of the sequences of same-case NPs and a straightforward account of some long standing problems such as how the additional same-case NPs are licensed, and in what respects the multiple nominative marking and the multiple accusative marking are alike and different from each other.
This paper presents a syntactic HPSG analysis of distance distributivity in Polish, where the challenge is to uniformly analyse a number of function lexemes PO 'each' which share their form and semantic contribution, but differ in their syntactic behaviour. To this end, the HPSG notion of weak head is employed in a novel way.
We show how the variation in the passive in Danish, English, and German can be accounted for. The dimensions in which the three languages differ are
- the existence of a morphological passive in Danish
- a subject requirement in Danish and English resulting in expletive insertion in impersonal
- constructions in Danish and absence of impersonal passives in English the possibility to promote the secondary object to subject in Danish
The differences are accounted for by differences in the structural/lexical case distinction and by mapping processes that insert expletives in Danish. The passive in general is accounted for by a lexical rule that is uniform across languages and hence captures the generalization regarding passive.
In this paper I introduce the notion of Usage Preferences (UPs), which are statistically significant preferences in usage which can concern any aspect of linguistics. I suggest that multiple violations of UPs can have additive effects, causing grammatical sentences to be judged as unacceptable. A new judgment on sentences is proposed, the downarrow (↓) to mark sentences that are taken to be grammatical but unacceptable due to UP violations. I illustrate the idea of UPs on the basis of a discussion of the English verbal anaphor do so, involving both a corpus analysis and two acceptability experiments. This leads to a discussion of the relationship between grammaticality and acceptability and to remarks on the methodological importance of taking UPs into account both in linguistic theorizing and in the construction of acceptability experiments.
This paper presents an analysis of the complex NP island effects in Chinese. I follow Ginzburg & Sag (2000)'s analysis of in situ wh-interrogative construction and propose that feature percolation from the non-head clause daughter to the head daughter is required for a proper treatment of in situ wh-relative. A semantic analysis of the idiosyncrasy of weishenme 'why' reveals that a definite reading is forced for a wh-relative when weishenme stays in situ. This requirement causes feature percolation into relative head to fail. In this way I show that island effects in Chinese can be independently ruled out in the grammar as a case of contradiction.
The present article discusses several aspects of the so-called correlate-es construction in German. This complex clausal construction can be identified by a correlative nominal element es ('it') occuring in the matrix clause and a right-peripheral full clausal argument linked to es. The article supports the hypothesis that correlative es has a janus-faced nature between an expletive and a referential meaning. This is the reason why existing approaches are not sufficient to capture the properties of the discussed construction in its entirety. The first part of the article sums up the common view on correlative es including the empirical properties of the construction as well as a brief survey of the relevant previous approaches trying to account for correlative es. Based on new empirical data, the second part of the article shows that none of these accounts is able to capture all relevant facts of the correlate-es construction because existing approaches usually ignore that the realization of correlative es is verb-class dependent. Hence, a new constraint-based analysis is developed that takes both empirical observations into account, the verb-class dependence and the janus-faced nature.
Nonverbal predicates in Modern Hebrew have been the subject of investigation in a number of studies. However, to our knowledge, none of them was corpus-based. Corpus searches reveal that the nonverbal constructions which are most commonly addressed in the literature are not the most commonly used ones. Once a broader range of data is considered additional issues are raised. Our analysis addresses these issues, unifying the treatment of three types of copular constructions that we identify in MH. The analysis is implemented as part of a larger-scale grammar, and is extensively tested.
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.
Simpler Syntax is an approach to grammar that calls for very restrictive limits on the notion of 'grammatical competence'. Specifically, it does not account for unacceptability judgments for sentences that are well-formed if they are fully licensed by the constructions of the language. SS leads us to seek accounts for such judgments in terms other than grammar per se, e.g., processing complexity, semantic or pragmatic well-formedness, discourse coherence, etc. I review several examples that suggest that the line that SS draws between competence on the one hand and performance and other mechanisms on the other is on the right track. Specifically, it does not account for unacceptability judgments for sentences that are well-formed if they are fully licensed by the constructions of the language. SS leads us to seek accounts for such judgments in terms other than grammar per se, e.g., processing complexity, semantic or pragmatic well-formedness, discourse coherence, etc. I review several examples that suggest that the line that SS draws between competence on the one hand and performance and other mechanisms on the other is on the right track.
In most recent work, Crysmann and Bonami (2012) suggest to reconcile the insights of inferential-realisational morphology (Anderson, 1992; Stump, 2001; Brown and Hippisley, 2012) with the full typology of variable morphotactics: situations where the expression of analogous feature sets can appear in various positions in the string. The authors proposed to account for these facts by importing, into HPSG, a variant of Paradigm Function Morphology (Stump, 2001) where realisation rules are doubly indexed for linear position and paradigmatic opposition. In this paper we first introduce more empirical challenges for theories of morphotactics that neither PFM nor the reformist approach of Crysmann and Bonami (2012) can accommodate. We then argue for a reappraisal of methods for morph introduction, and propose a new approach that replaces stipulation of classes of paradigmatic opposition with a general distinction between expression and conditioning (Carstairs, 1987; Noyer, 1992) which greatly expands the scope of Pāṇini’s Principle.
Unbounded dependencies in Modern Standard Arabic often involve not a gap but a null resumptive pronoun. The facts are quite complex, but it is not too difficult to extend the SLASH mechanism of HPSG to handle dependencies with a null resumptive pronoun. It is also not too difficult to restrict the distribution of gaps appropriately.
Comparison of the ellipsis-based theory of non-constituent coordination with its alternatives
(2012)
In this paper, I compare the ellipsis-based theory of non-constituent coordination proposed in Yatabe (2001) with three of its alternatives, namely the theory that has been widely accepted within the context of Categorial Grammar, Mouret's HPSG-based theory, and the theory proposed by Bachrach and Katzir in the framework of the Minimalist Program. It is found (i) that the CG-based theory of non-constituent coordination cannot deal with medial RNR, i.e. a subset of right-node raising constructions in which either all or a part of the right-node-raised material is realized at a location other than the right edge of the final conjunct, (ii) that Mouret's theory encounters similar difficulties when applied to RNR, and (iii) that Bachrach and Katzir's theory cannot be applied to left-node raising in English, has difficulty capturing the semantic inertness of medial RNR, and overgenerates in several ways. The ellipsis-based theory, on the other hand, appears to be consistent with all the observations.
Predicative complements canonically show number and/or gender agreement with their target. The most detailed proposal on how to model it in HPSG is provided in Kathol (1999). This proposal, though, chiefly deals with the predicative adjectives of the Romance languages, and turns out to be inappropriate for dealing with predicate nominals. There is an obvious way to repair it, but it cannot be fitted in the canonical HPSG treatment of clauses with a predicative complement. It can be fitted, though, in a treatment of such clauses that was proposed in Van Eynde (2009). Adopting that treatment, the agreement is modeled in terms of a constraint on the lexemes which select a predicative complement.
This paper presents an HPSG formalisation of how the ellipsis of case-marking affects the focus of the clause in Japanese. We restrict our attention to the nominative and accusative markers ga and o, and in view of the fact that the ellipsis effects on focushood vary between 1) ga and o and 2) different argument structures of the head verb, develop an essentially lexicalist account that combines both aspects, in which the implicit focus argument position is specified in the predicate. We argue that if a constituent is an implicit focus it does not, while if one is not it does, require a case-marker to be focused.
It has been analyzed that the word order of English comparative inversion is analogous to that of other subject-auxiliary inversions in that only a finite auxiliary verb can be followed by the subject. However, English comparative inversion should be distinguished from other inversions because the subject can be located between a cluster of auxiliary verbs and the non-auxiliary verb phrase in English comparative inversion. Existing analyses on subject-auxiliary inversion cannot account for this special kind of inversion. This paper proposes a new phrase type for English comparative inversion within the construction-based HPSG. In addition, I suggest that constraints on properties of lexemes participating in the new phrase type are governed by the construction-based approach, while the word order of English comparative inversion is determined by rules that the word order domain approach adopts. Also, it will be shown that these proposals can capture the word order of nor-inversion, as-inversion, and so-inversion as well as that of comparative inversion.
The Japanese infinitive-clause construction (InfCx) and gerund-clause construction (GerCx), which are the most basic subordination structures (considered as coordination structures by some) in the language, may convey a wide range of interclausal semantic relations, including 'temporal sequence', 'cause', and 'manner', largely due to pragmatic enrichment. This work addresses the question of what the core meaning(s) of the two constructions is (are), and demonstrates (i) that the InfCx and GerCx indicate either that the first-clause eventuality precedes or temporally subsumes the second-clause eventuality or that the two clauses stand in the rhetorical relation of contrast, and (ii) that the GerCx has a distinct sense that the InfCx lacks, which gives rise to the 'resulting state' interpretation.
It is known that VP-ellipsis and VP-anaphora are typologically different phenomena. English has VP-ellipses whereas Korean has VP-anaphora. The goals of this paper are (i) to develop a unified algorithm which can analyze these two different phenomena and (ii) to explain them using the developed resolution algorithm. In order to analyze these phenomena, this paper incorporates Jager's anaphora resolution mechanism (2010) into the typed feature structure formalism of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). In this paper, VP-ellipsis and VP-anaphora are analyzed as follows. First, English do and Korean kuleha-ta are introduced with the Geach value, and this value is changed with a slash-elimination rule. Then, one constituent combines with another by ordinary syntactic rules, while the information on the target predicate is percolated up. When a potential source appears, a slash-introduction rule is applied. Then, the source predicate activates the VP-resolution rule, and the target predicate is connected with the source in the semantic representations.
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.
The direct evidential "-te" in Korean: Its interaction with person and experiencer predicates
(2012)
This paper discusses the complex relations among the direct evidential "-te", person, and experiencer predicates in Korean. The questions of the paper are: (i) how the three components are related with each other in the evidential sentences, and (ii) how the interactions of the three components can be formally analyzed to correctly license only the well-formed evidential sentences. I show that in direct evidential construction with a non-private predicate (e.g. "pwutulep-" 'soft'), the asserter/epistemic authority (i.e. the speaker "na" 'I' in declarative or the addressee "ne" 'you' in question) must be the experiencer of the predicate, but there is no such constraint in direct evidential construction with a private predicate (e.g. "aphu-" 'sick'). I also show that the direct evidential construction with a non-private predicate is an instance of self-ascription. Then I propose an analysis of the experiencer predicates and associated lexical rules in the Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS) (Copestake, et al., 2005) of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) (Pollard and Sag, 1994; Sag, et al., 2003).
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.
We will observe which stem allomorph the affixes, the so-called 'non-past' affix, the past affix, the imperative affix, the negative affix and the voice affix-like verbs, select between the longer and the shorter in Japanese-Yanagawa dialect on the assumption that verbal lexemes may be associated with more than one stem. Observing the phenomenon more closely, we found that the verbal stem forms entertain default implicative relations in the stem dependency hierarchy. We will propose i) an implemented analysis of the past affix and ii) an implementation of the allomorph selections by the 'non-past' affix in Koga and Ono, 2010 as two examples.
In this paper I use the formal framework of minimalist grammars to implement a version of the traditional approach to ellipsis as 'deletion under syntactic (derivational) identity', which, in conjunction with canonical analyses of voice phenomena, immediately allows for voice mismatches in verb phrase ellipsis, but not in sluicing. This approach to ellipsis is naturally implemented in a parser by means of threading a state encoding a set of possible antecedent derivation contexts through the derivation tree. Similarities between ellipsis and pronominal resolution are easily stated in these terms. In the context of this implementation, two approaches to ellipsis in the transformational community are naturally seen as equivalent descriptions at different levels: the LF-copying approach to ellipsis resolution is best seen as a description of the parser, whereas the phonological deletion approach a description of the underlying relation between form and meaning.
Chung (2001) claims that non-final conjuncts without overt tense morphemes which produce asymmetric tense interpretations are to be analyzed as TP; and Lee (2005) argues that the verbal honorific affix -si- never occurs in non-final conjuncts so honorific agreement between the subject and the verb takes place in the final conjunct only and thus the Korean gapping constructions should be analyzed as vP coordination. However, these two previous analyses seem to fail to make the generalizations on the distributional behaviors of gapping constructions, facing theoretical and empirical difficulties. To solve the problems they face, we claim that verbal gapping in Korean is allowed to occur in all non-final conjuncts when the covert predicates of the non-final conjuncts have an identical semantic relation value with that of the overt verb in the final conjunct, regardless of the consistency of the honorific and tense values between conjuncts.
This paper is intended to investigate the linguistic behaviors of the Korean as-parenthetical constructions with the aim of devoting to distinguishing universal properties of as-parentheticals. This paper shows three prominent behaviors in Korean as-parenthetical constructions. First, the Korean as-clause displays that the syntactic gap in as-clauses must be realized as CP, through the variations on case marker. Secondly, the Korean as-parentheticals tend to have two types of as-clauses; CP or VP as-clause types. In addition, they are sensitive to the syntactic restrictions which can be noticed in as-parenthetical constructions: the sisterhood restriction and the Island boundary. Thirdly, the Korean as-parenthetical constructions reveal that they would require some pragmatic information which is combined with semantic meaning, in the process of getting the interpretation of as-clauses.
The paper presents a type of ellipsis similar to stripping and split conjuncts, yet irreducible to either of them. One aim of the analysis is to document the existence of this distinct ellipsis type within the class of constructions where the elided constituent is a verb or a verb phrase. It is argued that the main generative strategies, namely, deletion and null anaphora cannot be applied to this ellipsis type in order to account for it. Instead, the study shows that an approach which takes the asymmetry syntax-semantics of this construction as basic is much more successful in explaining the nature of this type of ellipsis. This alternative approach is the one offered by the HPSG framework.
This paper presents a left-branching constructionalist grammar design where the phrase structure tree does not correspond to the conventional constituent structure. The constituent structure is rather reflected by embeddings on a feature STACK. The design is compatible with incremental processing, as words are combined from left to right, one by one, and it gives a simple account of long distance dependencies, where the extracted element is assumed to be dominated by the extraction site. It is motivated by psycholinguistic findings.
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.
Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic have several relativization patterns, including relative clauses with and without relativizers and adjectival modification patterns. Previous generative work has targeted several phenomena, but there is no analysis which covers all relativization patterns in any generative framework. We present an HPSG analysis that covers these phenomena in a uniform manner. Based on Doron and Reintges (2005), we show that the crosslinguistically unusual syntax of adjectival modifiers is a language-internally expected variant of participial modifiers as found in English. We also present the first HPSG analysis of Arabic broad subjects and argue that they are selected as specifiers, accounting for the similarities between broad subjects and ordinary subjects.
Recent years have witnessed a renewal of interest in variable morph ordering, the situation where the position of a morph in the word is not constant. These situations present a challenge to extant inferential-realisational approaches to morphology (Stump, 2001), insofar as these adopt implicitly or explicitly an a-morphous approach to morphological composition (Anderson, 1992). In this paper we will first review the typology of known variable morph ordering phenomena in inflection. We then argue that the challenges can be met by making a distinction between paradigmatic opposition classes and syntagmatic position classes, and show that this distinction can readily be implemented in HPSG while keeping the amorphous assumption.
In this paper I explore the logical range of sentential negation types predicted by the theory of HPSG. I find that typological surveys confirm that attested simple negation strategies neatly line up with the types of lexical material given by assuming Lexical Integrity and standard Phrase Structure Grammar dependencies. I then extend the methodology to bipartite negation and derive a space of predicted sentential negation types. I present details of the analysis for each type and relevant examples where possible.
Backshift is a phenomenon affecting verb tense that is visible as a mismatch between some specific embedded contexts and other environments. For instance, the indirect speech equivalent of a sentence like 'Kim likes reading', with a present tense verb, may show the same verb in a past tense form, as in 'Sandy said Kim liked reading'. We present a general analysis of backshift, pooling data from English and Romance languages. Our analysis acknowledges that tense morphology is ambiguous between different temporal meanings, explicitly models the role of the speech time and the event times involved and takes the aspectual constraints of tenses into consideration.
Verbal suffix-repetition construction in Korean: A constraint- and construction-based approach
(2012)
There are various Verbal Suffix-Repetition (VSR) constructions in Korean, where suffixes such as -kena/tun(ci)/tun(ka) are attached to the repeated verbs. Calling the VSR Choice-denying Repeated Verbs construction, Lee (2011) claims that the following verb of the VSR, which can be replaced with mal-, should contain a negative but the preceding verb should be affirmative in the VSR construction which disallows any NPI within it. Unlike Lee (2011), we claim that the verbs in the VSR can freely occur either in the preceding position or in the following one regardless of their Neg value so long as they share the same verbal suffix forms such as -tun(ka). Furthermore, NPIs may occur within the VSR construction if they occur with a negative predicate within the same clause. To implement the findings above into HPSG, we have proposed the two lexical entries for mal-, the VSR Construction Rule, and the NPI Clause-mate Constraint. These tools enable us to account for the idiosyncratic properties of the VSR constructions under this constraint- and construction-based approach.
The Korean double nominative construction exhibits various properties distinguished not only from ordinary subject-object clauses but also from nominative complement constructions. Particularly, the second NP, not the initial NP, triggers the honorific agreement with the verb. I argue that the first NP of the construction is identified as a sentential specifier which exists in addition to the subject (cf. Major subject in Yoon 2004). The sentential specifier can be justified as the characteristic of the topic-prominent language in the sense of Li and Thompson (1976). Specifically I claim that any elements that satisfy the aboutness condition can be the sentential specifier. Finally, I show that HPSG's valence value and an optional lexical rule provides an elegant treatment of the construction; SPR list in a sentence level can be utilized for the sentential specifier (cf. Kim et al. 2007).
This paper presents an analysis of Danish free relative constructions. Fol- lowing Bresnan and Grimshaw (1978) we will adopt a wh-head (in Danish hv-head) analysis where the hv-phrase is the head of an NP. Also following Bresnan and Grimshaw (1978) we will propose an analysis which does not involve a filler-gap dependency between the hv-phrase and the gap in the sis- ter clause. Instead we will propose that the gap in the sister clause is bound off by a constructional constraint. In this way the analysis will be shown to differ from previous HPSG wh-head analyses of free relatives.
In HPSG relative clauses have been analyzed in terms of phonologically empty heads in Pollard and Sag (1994) and in terms of a complex system of phrase types in Sag (1997). Modern Standard Arabic has a distinction between relative clauses with a definite antecedent, which are introduced by a special complementizer, and relative clauses with an indefinite antecedent, which are 'bare' clauses. Analyses eschewing empty heads and assuming a complex system of phrase types face a number of problems. An analysis in which relatives with an indefinite antecedent are headed by a phonologically empty complementizer is more satisfactory. Thus, in the case of Arabic, the approach of Pollard and Sag (1994) seems preferable to the approach of Sag (1997).
This paper describes free relative constructions in Modern Standard Arabic (henceforth, MSA) and aims to provide an HPSG analysis for them. MSA has two types of free relative constructions. One, which is introduced by the complementizer ?allaði, looks just like a relative clause. The other, which is introduced by the elements man and maa, which also appear to be complementizers, does not look like a relative clause. Both types can be analysed in term of unary-branching structures (as NPs consisting just of a CP). In ?allaði free relatives, the NP and the value of SLASH can be coindexed via the value of MOD on the CP. In man and maa free relatives, the NP and the value of SLASH must be coindexed directly.
Korean has two types of answers shorter than full sentential answers: Fragments and null argument constructions. Apparently the two constructions have the same interpretative processes. However, there are some cases where the fragment and null argument construction behave differently: e.g., wh-puzzles, sloppy interpretation. We suggest that the two constructions involve two different types of anaphora and that the sources of sloppy(-like) interpretation are fundamentally distinct. Fragments pattern differently with null arguments in that only the former may display genuine sloppy readings. The latter may yield sloppy-like readings which are pragmatically induced by the explicature that can be cancelled unlike genuine sloppy readings in fragments. Evidence (wh-ellipsis, quantifier ellipsis) all lends substantial support to our claim that fragments are analyzed as an instance of clausal ellipsis while null arguments are analyzed as an instance of null pronoun pro; hence, the former is surface anaphora whereas the latter is deep anaphora in the sense of Hankamer & Sag (1976).
Verb second (V2) word order is determined by considering the absolute position of clausal constituents. Previous accounts of such word order in HPSG have been developed for individual V2 languages (predominantly German) but are often not cross-linguistically applicable. I propose a set of generalized mechanisms in linearization-based SBCG which accounts for cross-linguistic V2 data by use of: (1) a simple two-valued feature rather than many-typed topological domains, (2) domain compaction, and (3) constructionally-determined domain positions. Not only does this analysis account for V2 placement, but it can also model verb third (V3) placement and other positionally-stipulated word orders.
The HPSG binding theory in Pollard and Sag (1994) cannot account for the binding-theoretic interaction between main clause and adjunct-internal elements. Following Hukari and Levine (1995), I claim that structural configurations must be taken into account. In this article, I present a revised version of Hukari and Levine's configurational relation called v(alence-based)-c-command and propose that Principle C must involve this relation in addition to the obliqueness-based relation of o-command. New data are provided that strongly support the proposed revision of the HPSG binding theory. Finally, I argue that Principle C is syntactic rather than pragmatic in nature.
This paper examines the morpho-syntactic puzzle of case suffixes and postpositions that Hungarian displays. Although these two categories show distributional similarities, they are distinguishable from a morphological and a syntactic point of view. Moreover, this language has defective postpositions which are in complementary distribution with case suffixes. I argue that there is no real argument for lumping case suffixes together with postpositions into the same syntactic category, as has been suggested in recent linguistics studies (Trommer, 2008; Asbury, 2007). I rather propose to treat case suffixes and postpositions as two different objects: case suffixes are inflectional material on nominal heads and postpositions as well as defective postpositions are independent words subcategorizing an NP. This distinction straightforwardly accounts for morphological and syntactic differences. Finally, the shared distributional properties between case suffixes, postpositions and defective postpositions are captured by means of the use of the MARKING feature.
This paper presents a Synchronous Tree Adjoining Grammar (STAG) account of Information Structure, whereby Givenness-marking requires a link between nodes on a syntactic tree and LF nodes whose interpretation is supplied by a contextually determined set of Given semantic objects. By hypothesis, the interpretation of linked nodes bypasses a default interpretation principle that requires pragmatic reasoning to disambiguate elements and enrich semantic material. Thus, interpreting Given elements requires less cognitive effort than Focused elements. This, combined with some established insights from Game-theoretic pragmatics, yields empirical advantages over more traditional semantic/pragmatic analyses of equal simplicity.
This paper hypothesizes that transfer-based machine translation systems can be improved by encoding information structure in both the source and target grammars, and preserving information structure in the transfer stage. We explore how information structure can be represented within the HPSG/MRS formalism (Pollard and Sag, 1994; Copestake et al., 2005) and how it can help refine multilingual MT. Building upon that framework, we provide a sample translation between English and Japanese and check the feasibility of the proposals in small-scale translation systems built with the HPSG/MRS-based LOGON MT infrastructure (Oepen et al., 2007). Our experiment shows the information structure-based MT system that we propose in this paper reduces the number of translations 75.71% for Japanese and 80.23% for Korean. The dramatic reductions in the number of translations is expected to make a contribution to our HPSG/MRS-based MT in terms of latency as well as accuracy.
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.
In this article we show how the HPSG approach to information structure of De Kuthy (2002) and De Kuthy and Meurers (2003) can be extended to capture givenness (Schwarzschild, 1999) and make the right predictions for so-called deaccenting of given information, a widespread phenomenon not previously dealt with in HPSG.
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 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.
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 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.
In this paper, I discuss verb to noun conversion in French. The properties of the input verb and the output noun are presented and a formal representation is proposed using the SBCG framework. The use of such a formalism based on constraints and multiple inheritance highlights the difficulties in defining what exactly is a conversion rule. I propose that the different properties of the input verb and the output noun can be thought of as different dimensions of classification, which characterize the verb to noun conversion rule.
Based on the notion of a lexicon with default inheritance, I address the problem of how to provide a template for lexical representations that allows us to capture the relatedness between inflected word forms and canonically derived lexemes within a broadly realizational-inferential model of morphology. To achieve this we need to be able to represent a whole host of intermediate types of lexical relatedness that are much less frequently discussed in the literature. These include transpositions such as deverbal participles, in which a word's morphosyntactic class changes (e.g. verb ⇒ adjective) but no semantic predicate is added to the semantic representation and the derived word remains, in an important sense, a "form" of the base lexeme (e.g. the 'present participle form of the verb'). I propose a model in which morphological properties are inherited by default from syntactic properties and syntactic properties are inherited from semantic properties, such as ontological category (the Default Cascade). Relatedness is defined in terms of a Generalized Paradigm Function (perhaps in reality a relation), a generalization of the Paradigm Function of Paradigm Function Morphology (Stump 2001). The GPF has four components which deliver respectively specifications of a morphological form, syntactic properties, semantic representation and a lexemic index (LI) unique to each individuated lexeme in the lexicon. In principle, therefore, the same function delivers derived lexemes as inflected forms. In order to ensure that a newly derived lexeme of a distinct word class can be inflected I assume two additional principles. First, I assume an Inflectional Specifiability Principle, which states that the form component of the GPF (which defines inflected word forms of a lexeme) is dependent on the specification of the lexeme's morpholexical signature, a declaration of the properties that the lexeme is obliged to inflect for (defined by default on the basis of morpholexical class). I then propose a Category Erasure Principle, which states that 'lower' attributes are erased when the GPF introduces a non-trivial change to a 'higher' attribute (e.g. a change to the semantic representation entails erasure of syntactic and morphological information). The required information is then provided by the Default Cascade, unless overridden by specific declarations in the GPF. I show how this model can account for a variety of intermediate types of relatedness which cannot easily be treated as either inflection or derivation, and conclude with a detailed illustration of how the system applies to a particularly interesting type of transposition in the Samoyedic language Sel'kup, in which a noun is transposed to a similitudinal adjective whose form is in paradigmatic opposition to case-marked noun forms, and which is therefore a kind of inflection.
This paper primarily presents an analysis of nominal inflection in Hindi within the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993, 1994 and Harley and Noyer 1999). Müller (2002, 2003, 2004) for German, Icelandic and Russian nouns respectively and Weisser (2006) for Croatian nouns have also used Distributed Morphology (henceforth DM) to analyze nominal inflectional morphology. This paper will discuss in detail the inflectional categories and inflectional classes, the morphological processes operating at syntax, the distribution of vocabulary items and the readjustment rules required to describe Hindi nominal inflection. Earlier studies on Hindi inflectional morphology (Guru 1920, Vajpeyi 1958, Upreti 1964, etc.) were greatly influenced by the Paninian tradition (classical Sanskrit model) and work with Paninian constructs such as root and stem. They only provide descriptive studies of Hindi nouns and verbs and their inflections without discussing the role or status of affixes that take part in inflection. The discussion on the mechanisms (morphological operations and rules) used to analyze or generate word forms are missing in these studies. In addition, these studies do not account for syntax-morphology or morphology-phonology mismatches that show up in word formation. One aim of this paper is to present an economical way of forming noun classes in Hindi as compared to other traditional methods, especially gender and stem ending based or paradigm based methods that give rise to a large number of inflectional paradigms. Using inflectional class information to analyse the various forms of Hindi nouns, we can reduce the number of affixes and word-generation and readjustment rules that are required to describe nominal inflection. The analysis also helps us in developing a morphological analyzer for Hindi. The small set of rules and fewer inflectional classes are of great help to lexicographers and system developers. To the best of our knowledge, the analysis of Hindi inflectional morphology based on DM and its implementation in a Hindi morphological analyzer has not been done before. The methods discussed here can be applied to other Indian languages for analysis as well as word generation.
This paper presents a descriptive overview and formal analysis of the use of pronominal clitics for realizing various types of arguments in Persian, with particular emphasis on object clitics in the verbal domain. We argue that pronominal clitics behave more like suffixes than independent syntactic elements; in cases where they take syntactic scope over an NP or a PP, they must be phrasal affixes. We propose an HPSG analysis to account for the morphosyntactic aspects of verbal suffixation of object clitics, possessive clitics, preverbal object clitics, and clitic doubling constructions. Finally, we explore extensions of the analysis to periphrastic verb forms, and we compare our proposals for Persian to previous HPSG work on clitic phenomena in other languages.
In the Cognate Object Construction (COC) a typically intransitive verb combines with a postverbal noun phrase whose head noun is morphologically or semantically cognate to the verb. I will argue that English has a family of COCs which consists of four different types. The COCs share common core properties but differ with respect to some of their syntactic and semantic properties. I will capture the ''cognateness'' between the verb and the noun in all COCs by token identities at the level of their lexical semantic contribution. I will use an inheritance hierarchy on lexical rule sorts to model the family relations among the different COC types.
Mazatec is an Eastern Otomanguean language spoken by about 200,000 people, located in the northeastern part of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. The present paper aims to shed new light on Mazatec verb inflection within the framework of current research on Otomanguean phonology and morphology. We intend to show that, despite bewildering apparent complexity, mainly due to extensive morphophonological processes, Mazatec inflectional morphology is in fact rather simple and regular. Realizational approaches, in particular Paradigm Function Morphology (PFM) seem especially adequate to capture such regularities.
Korean comparative constructions: A constraint-based approach and computational implementation
(2010)
The complexity of comparative constructions in each language has given challenges to both theoretical and computational analyses. This paper first identifies types of comparative constructions in Korean and discusses their main grammatical properties. It then builds a syntactic parser couched upon the typed feature structure grammar, HPSG and proposes a context-dependent interpretation for the comparison. To check the feasibility of the proposed analysis, we have implemented the grammar into the existing Korean Resource Grammar. The results show us that the grammar we have developed here is feasible enough to parse Korean comparative sentences and yield proper semantic representations though further development is needed for a finer model for contextual information.
Semitic languages exhibit rich nonconcatenative morphological operations, which can generate a myriad of derived lexemes. Especially, the feature rich, root-driven morphology in the Arabic language demonstrates the construction of several verb-derived nominals (verbal nouns) such as gerunds, active participles, passive participles, locative participles, etc. Although HPSG is a successful syntactic theory, it lacks the representation of complex nonconcatenative morphology. In this paper, we propose a novel HPSG representation for Arabic nominals and various verb-derived nouns. We also present the lexical type hierarchy and derivational rules for generating these verb-derived nominals using the HPSG framework.
Usage-based preferences in written sentence production: The role of local and global statistics
(2010)
In this paper, we will discuss the role of different levels of frequency distributions in sentence processing and in written production, looking at French homophones. A comparison of experimental data and corpus statistics will demonstrate that lexical frequencies as well as local and global coherences have to be taken into account to fully explain the empirically established patterns.
Investigating the morphological and syntactic properties of discontinuous negative marking in Hausa, I shall suggest a constructional approach involving edge inflection, accounting simultaneously for the morphologically bound nature of the initial marker and its interaction with the TAM system, haplology of the final marker, and wide scope over coordination. I will argue that the degree of morphological integration of initial markers and haplology of final markers both favour an edge feature approach over phrasal affixation.
There are fascinating problems at the syntax-morphology interface which tend to be missed. I offer a brief explanation of why that may be happening, then give a Canonical Typology perspective, which brings these problems to the fore. I give examples showing that the phenomena could in principle be treated either by syntactic rules (but these would be complex) or within morphology (but this would involve redundancy). Thus 'non-autonomous' case values, those which have no unique form but are realized by patterns of syncretism, could be handled by a rule of syntax (one with access to other features, such as number) or by morphology (with resulting systematic syncretisms). I concentrate on one of the most striking sets of data, the issue of prepositional government in Latvian, and outline a solution within Network Morphology using structured case values.
Coherence generally refers to a kind of predicate formation where a verb forms a complex predicate with the head of its infinitival complement. Adjectives taking infinitival complements have also been shown to allow coherence, but the exact conditions for coherence with adjectives appear not to have been addressed in the literature. Based on a corpus-study (supplemented with grammaticality judgements by native speakers) we show that adjectives fall into three semantically and syntactically defined classes correlating with their ability to construct coherently. Non-factive and non-gradable adjectives allow coherence, factive and gradable adjectives do not allow coherence and non-factive and gradable adjectives are tolerated with coherence. On the basis of previous work on coherence in German we argue that coherence allows the infinitival complement of a verb or an adjective to be "split-up", so that the head and a dependent of this head are associated with different information structural functions. In this respect coherence patterns with extraction structures where the extracted constituent has an information structural function different from the constituent from which it is extracted. Following literature on the information structural basis of extraction islands, we show how the lack of coherence with factive adjectives follows from their complements' being information structurally backgrounded, while the infinitival complements of non-factive adjectives tend to a higher fusion with the matrix clause. We also show that coherence is observed with attributive adjectives as well, arguing that coherence is not a distinct verbal property. Finally we provide an analysis of coherence with adjectives within HPSG.
This work focuses on the syntax and semantics of the expression vice versa, and shows that its syntactic distribution is much more flexible than semantically related expressions. Although vice versa usually appears in clausal coordinate environments, it can in principle occur in any other type of construction. Second, it can occur as an embedded verb phrase or even as a noun phrase, rather than as an adjunct. This suggests that vice versa is a propositional anaphor that corresponds to a converse of a propositional antecedent. Finally, although the predicates singled out to be interchanged are usually nominal, they can in fact be of virtually any part of speech. I argue that a possible account of the interpretation of vice versa lies at the interface between logical form (with rich decompositional lexical semantics along the lines of Pustejovsky (1995)), and pragmatics (drawing from independent work by Hobbs (1990) and Kehler (2002)).
We describe an empirical method to explore and contrast the roles of default and principal part information in the differentiation of inflectional classes. We use an unsupervised machine learning method to classify Russian nouns into inflectional classes, first with full paradigm information, and then with particular types of information removed. When we remove default information, shared across classes, we expect there to be little effect on the classification. In contrast when we remove principal part information we expect there to be a more detrimental effect on classification performance. Our data set consists of paradigm listings of the 80 most frequent Russian nouns, generated from a formal theory which allows us to distinguish default and principal part information. Our results show that removal of forms classified as principal parts has a more detrimental effect on the classification than removal of default information. However, we also find that there are differences within the defaults and principal parts, and we suggest that these may in part be attributable to stress patterns.
Welsh is a language in which unbounded dependency constructions involve both gaps and resumptive pronouns (RPs). Gaps and RPs appear in disjoint sets of environments. Otherwise, however, they are quite similar. This suggests that they involve the same mechanism, and in HPSG that they involve the SLASH feature. It is possible to provide an analysis in which RPs are associated with the SLASH feature but are also the ordinary pronouns which they appear to be.
This papers addresses information-structural restrictions on the occurrence of what is known as "multiple fronting" in German. Multiple fronting involves the realization of (what appears to be) more than one constituent in the first position of main clause declaratives, a clause type that otherwise respects the verb-second constraint of German. Relying on a large body of naturally occurring instances of multiple fronting with the surrounding discourse context, we show that in certain contexts, multiple fronting is fully grammatical in German, in contrast to what has sometimes been claimed previously. Examination of this data reveals two different patterns, which we analyze in terms of two distinct constructions, each instantiating a specific pairing of form, meaning and contextual appropriateness.
A little discussed feature of English are non-restrictive relative clauses in which the antecedent is normally not an NP and the gap follows an auxiliary, as in Kim will sing, which Lee won't. These relative clauses resemble clauses with auxiliary complement ellipsis or fronting. There are a variety of analyses that might be proposed, but there are reasons for thinking that the best analysis is one where which is a nominal filler associated with a gap which is generally non-nominal: a filler-gap mismatch analysis in other words.
This paper addresses the form-meaning relation of multimodal communicative actions by means of a grammar that combines verbal input with hand gestures. Unlike speech, gesture signals are interpretable only through their semantic relation to the synchronous speech content. This relation serves to resolve the incomplete meaning that is revealed by gestural form alone. We demonstrate that by using standard linguistic methods, speech and gesture can be integrated in a constrained way into a single derivation tree which maps to a uniform meaning representation.
Does chain hybridization in Irish support movement-based approaches to long-distance dependencies?
(2010)
Huybregts (2009) makes the claim that hybrid A'-chains in Irish favor derivational theories of syntax over representational ones such as HPSG. In this paper, we subject this assertion to closer scrutiny. Based on a new technical proposal, we will reach the conclusion that, in principle, both derivational and representational accounts can accomodate hybrid dependencies. Thus, no argument against either approach can be made on the basis of the Irish data, disconfirming Huybregts's (2009) claim.
The analysis of the copula as a semantically vacuous word in mainstream HPSG is appropriate for some of its uses, such as the progressive and the passive, but not for its use in clauses with a predicative complement. In such clauses the copula denotes a relation of coreference between the indices of the subject and the predicative complement.
This paper explores the use of HPSG for modeling historical phonological change and grammaticalization, focusing on the evolution of the pronunciation of word-final consonants in Modern French. The diachronic evidence is presented in detail, and interpreted as two main transitions, first from Old French to Middle French, then from Middle French to the modern language. The data show how the loss of final consonants, originally a phonological development in Middle French, gave rise to the grammaticalized external sandhi phenomenon known as consonant liaison in modern French. The stages of development are analyzed formally as a succession of HPSG lexical schemas in which phonological representations are determined by reference to the immediately following phonological context.
The paper aims to present approach to HPSG phonology which would account for underlying forms of phonemes. It shows some of the issues arising in monostratal analyses of phonology, and proposes a solution based on a notion of underlying representations. The approach presented, partly inspired by Optimality Theory, resolves cases of neutralisation and opacity by formulating constraints which either restrict the surface representation or relate it to the underlying form.
In this paper we investigate German idioms which contain phraseologically fixed clauses (PCl). To provide a comprehensive HPSG theory of PCls we extend the idiom theory of Soehn 2006 in such a way that it can distinguish different degrees of regularity in idiomatic expressions. An in-depth analysis of two characteristic PCls shows how our two-dimensional theory of idiomatic expressions can be applied and illustrates the scope of the theory.
This paper discusses ergative case assignment in Hindi and its interaction with aspectual verb complexes or complex predicate constructions. It is shown that ergative case is assigned by the last head in the aspectual verb complex and that ergative case on the subject of intransitive verbs denoting bodily-functions is associated with a counter-to-expectation meaning. It is then shown that aspect complex predicates in Hindi involve two distinct syntactic structures, which have similar semantics. While one syntactic structure involves argument composition, the other involves a head-modifier structure. It is argued that the existence of two structures favor approaches to the interface between syntax and semantics which do not require a uniform isomorphism between the semantics and syntax of aspect.
Preposed negation in Danish
(2009)
In Danish the base position of the negation and negated quantifier phrases is between the subject and the finite verb in embedded clauses. However, in embedded clauses introduced by a non-veridical complementizer such as hvis ('if') or om ('whether') the negation and negated quantifier phrases can also appear between the complementizer and the subject. This phenomenon is referred to as preposed negation. The paper investigates the structure and semantics of this construction. It is argued that preposed negation is no adjunction structure, but a special construction where the negation element is a sister of the complementizer and the filler of a filler-gap-structure. It is further argued that preposed negation is associated with negated verum-focus of a clause lacking an (aboutness-) topic. The negation of a verum predicate explains why preposed negation fails to license strong negative polarity items and to rule out positive ones. The lack of a topic explains why preposed negation is preferred with non-referential subjects and with weak readings of indefinite subjects and why preposed negation is incompatible with topic-binding particles.The final section presents an HPSG-analysis of preposed negation using Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS).
The present paper gives an account of Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) in Mandarin Chinese. After a typological presentation of the phenomenon, we give an overview of the Chinese data with examples of the semantic variations of SVCs. The inventory of SVC types is classified according to causal and temporal relations between the components. We also discuss the pragmatic conditions on the use of SVCs as well as alternative, semantically equivalent constructions. A HPSG-analysis is proposed for marked SVCs, which uses the interaction between aspect marking and the set of possible subordinative relations to deduce the extra-lexical meaning of the construction. Particular attention is payed to the syntactically peculiar SVC with shared internal arguments, which is accounted for by a non-cancellation approach to valence requirements.
On predication
(2009)
This paper discusses copula constructions in English, German, and Danish and argues that a uniform analysis of all copula constructions is inappropriate. I provide evidence from German that there should be a raising variant of the copula in addition to an identificational copula. A unary schema is provided that maps referential NPs that can be used as arguments onto predicational NPs. Data from Danish shows that predicational NPs can be subjects in specificational structures. An account for such specificational structures is provided and the different behaviour of predicational and specificational structures with regard to question tags is explained. A similar contrast can be found in German left dislocation structures, which follows from the assumptions made in this paper.
A modified treatment of complex predicate formation allows for a reduction of selectional features (that is abolishing of xcomp or vcomp) and for a uniform treatment of predicational phrases in copula constructions and resultative secondary predicates. This yields an account for constituent order variants that remained unexplained by earlier analyses.