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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.
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.
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.
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.
In French, Italian, and Romanian, forms inherited from the Latin paradigm 'esse' are used for the copula, the passive auxiliary and tense or perfective auxiliaries. We show that the copula and the passive auxiliary should be identified, while the tense or perfective auxiliaries are different lexemes. Moreover, the copula has the same description across all the Romance languages. While they all are argument inheritance verbs, the copula and the tense or perfective auxiliaries differ with respect to their complement structure: (i) the second only have one complement structure (the complement participle is complement unsaturated), the copula has two complement structures (the predicate is either complement saturated or unsaturated); (ii) French and Italian tense auxiliaries are the head of a flat VP, where the participle is sister to its subcategorized complements, the Romanian perfective auxiliary is the head of a verbal complex; (iii) when the complement predicate is unsaturated, the Romance copula is the head of a flat VP.
Two consequences of the analysis are worth mentioning. First, the copula (and the passive auxiliary) should not be taken into account when stating the environments for auxiliary selection in French and Italian. Second, argument inheritance and complement structure are different phenomena, and argue in favor of theories which systematically distinguish between valence features and constituent structures.
We contrast two types of sentences with a preposed NP in French in a construction based HPSG grammar. They differ with respect to different grammatical aspects (syntax, semantics, pragmatics and phonology), which cluster uniquely into constructions. Both are colloquial, a reason why they have been recognized only recently (see Zribi-Hertz 1986, 1996, Sabio 1995, 2006). Accordingly, we rely for the data on spoken corpora (Corpaix, CFRP) as well as on our intuitions. Both constructions involve a partitioned semantics but this mode of composition is associated with different effects. One construction is characterized semantically: the preposed NP is the theme of a categorical proposition. The other construction is characterized pragmatically: it is associated with an independent declarative clause, a typical use of which is to signal a break in the interaction.
In this paper, we provide a novel account of French causatives that crucially derives the core properties of the construction inside-out from the downstairs lexical verb to the causative verb, rather than outside-in, as is commonly assumed by argument composition (Miller & Sag, 1997; Abeillé & Godard, 1997; Abeillé et al., 1998). We shall argue on the basis of clitic trapping (Miller & Sag, 1997), as well as marking of the downstairs subject (Koenig, 1998) that the downstairs verb assumes a more active role than what is suggested by an argument composition approach and, conversely, we shall show that argument composition leads to problems with coordination and with en-cliticisation. The analysis we are going to propose combines an inversion analysis of the downstairs subject as a downstairs complement, accounting for scrambling and case marking, with an analysis of clitic climbing in terms of inflectional periphrasis (Aguila-Multner & Crysmann 2020).
This paper investigates the structure and agreement of coordinated binominals in the form Det N1 et N2 in French. We provide corpus data and experimental data to show that different strategies exist, depending on their readings: singular Det for joint reading (mon collègue et ami, 'my.MSG colleague.MSG and friend.MSG'), plural Det agreement (mes frère et soeur 'my.PL brother.MSG and sister.FSG') or closest conjunct agreement (mon nom et prénom, 'my.MSG surname.MSG and first name.MSG') for split reading. These results challenge previous syntactic analyses of binominals (Le Bruyn and de Swart, 2014), stating that Det combines with N1, forming a DP and the later coordinates with N2. We then propose an HPSG analysis to account for French binominals.
This paper builds on Zwicky's (1986) notion of shape condition, that is, a rule that specifies the phonological shape of inflected forms "by reference to triggers at least some of which lie outside the syntactic word". Zwicky observes that "many rules traditionally classified as external sandhi rules are [shape conditions]". They are not phonological rules in the usual sense, since they only apply to specific lexical items and are active within syntactic rather than phonological domains.
Shape conditions are problematic in many standard grammar architectures. On the one hand, they seem to be constraints on lexical entries, while on the other hand, they make reference to the syntactic context. Hayes (1990) has sketched a theory of "precompiled phrasal phonology" in which allomorph choice is conditioned by subcategorization frames in lexical entries. However, his approach is not formalized in any detail, and moreover makes the implicit claim that the relation between a shape condition target and its triggers can be equated with the syntactic relation between a lexical head and its complement. Although this assumption holds good for the Hausa phenomena he addresses, we do not believe that it holds in general.
HPSG appears to offer promising framework for formalizing something like Hayes' approach, but the standard machinery also makes it hard to distinguish a shape condition trigger from a complement. In order to overcome this difficulty, we develop the notion of phonological context: a feature of signs which allows us to condition allomorphic alternation in terms of (i) the phonological edges, and (ii) the syntactic properties of an expression's immediate syntactic sisters. We show how our analysis deals with four illustrative cases: the indefinite article alternation in English, syncretic liaison forms for possessive pronouns in French, Hausa verb-final vowel shortening, and soft mutation in Welsh nouns.