440 Romanische Sprachen; Französisch
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Conventional wisdom holds that productive morphology is regular morphology. Drawing evidence from French, we argue that the description of many lexeme formation processes is simplified if we hold that a productive rule may give rise to inflectionally irregular lexemes. We argue that the notion of a stem space allows for a straightforward description of this phenomenon: each lexeme comes equipped with a vector of possibly distinct stems, which serve as bases for inflectional form construction. The stem space is structured by default relations which encode the regular pattern of inflection; (partial) irregularities occur when a lexeme specifies a stem space violating the default relations. Derived irregularity is then the effect of a productive lexeme formation rule which specifies an irregular stem space for its output.
Comparative correlative (CC) constructions have received much attention in recent years. Major issues have been whether they involve special constructions and whether they have symmetric or asymmetric structures. Evidence from Romance suggests that they require special constructions and that they may be either symmetric or asymmetric. French has a single construction which is asymmetric for some speakers and symmetric for others. Spanish has two distinct constructions, one asymmetric and the other symmetric with quite different properties. The facts can be accommodated in a straightforward way within construction-based HPSG.
Of all French functional elements, the form de has without question the widest variety of uses, and presents the greatest challenge for linguistic description and analysis. Historically a preposition, it still has a number of prepositional uses in modern French, but in many contexts it calls for an altogether different treatment. We begin by outlining a general distinction between oblique and non-oblique uses of de. We then develop a detailed account of constructions where de combines with an N'. We provide a unitary analysis of de in three constructions (quantifier extraction, "quantification at a distance", and negative contexts) which have been not been considered to be related in previous accounts.
While French degree words in French have been assigned several syntactic categories, we show that they are rather highy polymorphic adverbs (they occur in all syntactic domains), which select the expression they modify on a purely semantic basis. Like French adverbs in general, they occur both to the left and to the right of the head they modify. Following previous work (a.o. van Noord and Bouma 1994, Abeillé and Godard 1997, Bouma et al. 2000), we assign them two different grammatical functions, adjuncts and complements. Semantically, they differ from quantifiers. We follow Kennedy (2000) who analyzes them as scalar predicate modifiers. Finally, the specific syntactic constraints that characterize a subset of them can be shown to follow from, or be related to, their weight properties (Abeillé and Godard 2000). We conclude that their apparently idiosyncratic properties fit into a more general theory of grammar.
Leaving aside elliptical coordinations, it is striking that no agreement has been reached on the structure of basic coordinate constructions. We propose that:
- coordinate constructions are structurally asymmetric: the conjunction makes a subconstituent with one of the conjuncts.
- such constituents can have several functions: coordinate daughter, adjunct daughter or main clause.
In order to show that some conjuncts should be analysed as adjuncts, we focus on asymmetric cases of coordination, in which the order of the conjuncts cannot be reversed, taking examples from French, Welsh and Korean. We present an HPSG analysis which treats the coordinating conjunctions as weak heads, with lexical subtypes, and coordinate phrases as multi-headed constructions, with different subtypes.
This paper presents a descriptive overview of liaison, giving an idea of the scope of the phenomenon and possible approaches to its analysis. As for the contextual conditions on liaison, in many cases, the traditional notions of obligatory and prohibited liaison do not reflect speakers' actual behavior. It turns out that general syntactic constraints cannot determine the systematic presence or absence of liaison at a given word boundary. At best, specific constraints can be formulated to target particular classes of constructions. To express such constraints, I propose a system of representation in the framework of HPSG. The use of EDGE features (introduced by Miller (1992) for a GPSG treatment of French) provides the necessary link between phrasal descriptions and the properties of phrase-peripheral elements.
I examine Spanish and French agreement in sentences with "affective" N/A de N constructions, in terms of an agreement theory growing out of Pollard and Sag (1994, §2) and Kathol (1999), with a distinction between two kinds of agreement relations: index agreement and morphosyntactic concord. The application of this theory to hybrid nouns (Wechsler and Zlati'c, 2000) extends straightforwardly to affective constructions. Furthermore, Kathol's characterization of the difference between hybrid nouns in Spanish and French, which I pair with an interpretation in terms of the default unification mechanism of Lascarides and Copestake (1999), turns out to make correct predictions about subtle differences in predicate agreement with affective constructions in the two languages.
Clitic Climbing Revisited
(2003)
Presently, there is overall consent among researchers on Romance in HPSG (Miller and Sag, 1997, Abeillé et al., 1998, Monachesi, 1996, 1999) that bounded clitic climbing (CC) is best understood in terms of argument composition. Despite the fact that all current analyses of CC are based on the same core idea, individual analyses of this phenomenon differ.
In this paper, I shall propose a unified approach that will be applicable to CC in both French and Italian. The approach will be cast entirely in terms of valence lists, argument structure and slash, such that construction- or language-specific book-keeping devices can be eliminated. As a side-effect, this approach provides a more strengthened view of lexical integrity, in that morphological information, i.e. an argument's mode of realisation, will not be directly accessible for subcategorisation.
Remarks on Marking
(2002)
This paper calls for a reexamination of the Marking Theory of HPSG, which in its standard form involves a considerable amount of dedicated formal machinery, but which proves to be inapplicable for most types of grammatical marking. As an alternative, it is demonstrated that head-marker phrases can be reanalyzed as head-complement structures, with the marking element treated as the syntactic head. This approach allows the elimination of all marking-specific formal apparatus, with the exception of the attribute MARKING, which percolates as an ordinary HEAD feature, and whose function is significantly expanded.
The proposed approach allows marking elements to be related to other lexical heads (prepositions, in particular), and marking constructions are better integrated in the grammar, rather than being grouped into an exceptional class of head-marker phrases.
This paper presents a general approach to verbal inflection with special emphasis on suppletion phenomena. The paper focuses on French, but the approach is general enough to apply to a wide variety of languages.
In the first part of the paper, we show that suppletion is not erratic: suppletive forms tend to always appear in groups, in definite areas of verbal paradigms. Our analysis is based on the observation of a number of dependency relations between inflectional forms of verbs (somewhat similar to rules of referral (Zwicky 1985, Stump 1993)). We define for each language a stem dependency tree based on these observations, which allows one to predict the whole paradigm of every verb in the language on the basis of a minimal number of idiosyncratic stems. We use the tree to minimize the quantity of redundant phonological information that has to be listed in the lexicon for a given lexeme, assuming that an optimal analysis of inflection should be able to derive all and only intuitively predictable inflectional forms from a single representation.
The second part of the paper attempts to integrate the analysis in an HPSG hierarchical lexicon. Morphological dependency relations are represented directly by mentioning a lexical sign in another sign's lexical entry. The approach to suppletion proposed in the first part is made explicit using a combination of online type construction and default constraints on the phonology of dependent signs.