Refine
Year of publication
- 2006 (95) (remove)
Document Type
- Conference Proceeding (95) (remove)
Language
- English (59)
- German (34)
- French (1)
- Multiple languages (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (95)
Keywords
- Informationsstruktur (9)
- Koordination <Linguistik> (3)
- Negation (3)
- Computerlinguistik (2)
- Literaturdatenbank (2)
- Numerus (2)
- Phonetik (2)
- Polnisch (2)
- Russisch (2)
- Suchmaschine (2)
Institute
- Universitätsbibliothek (22)
- Medizin (9)
- Extern (6)
- Zentrum für Weiterbildung (3)
- Georg-Speyer-Haus (2)
- Geowissenschaften (2)
- Gesellschaftswissenschaften (2)
- Erziehungswissenschaften (1)
- Geschichtswissenschaften (1)
- Informatik (1)
This paper proposes a projectionist account of the unexpressed object alternations in HPSG. The approach is based on the two-level mapping mechanism, developed in Manning and Sag (1998) and Sag et al (2003). The proposed analysis keeps identical argument structure values in the lexeme description of both valence alternatives, while different surface valence values are related by a lexical rule.
The HPSG model is applied cross-linguistically to English and Bulgarian. Some Bulgarian-specific traits, such as the limited alternation range and the grammaticalized aspect, related to the formal characteristics of the unexpressed object alternations, are discussed and interpreted within HPSG.
The treatment of French causatives and pronominal affixes outlined in Miller and Sag (1997) and Abeillé et al. (1998) is notable for its comprehensive coverage and analytic detail, but it relies on a number of ad hoc features and types that have little empirical justification. We sketch a new treatment of the same data set, which eliminates multiple lexical entries for the causative, as well as a number of other undesirable analytic devices. Our account builds on a long-standing observation that seeming irregularities in the system of case assignment to the causee of faire are not in fact exceptional, but determined by the general case assignment behavior of transitive verbs. This generalization, first incorporated into an HPSG analysis by Bratt (1990), was abandoned in subsequent HPSG work that sought to expand the coverage of French beyond that of Bratt's analysis. Our goal here is to show that broad coverage need not come at the expense of linguistically significant generalizations.
This paper presents an overview of a proposed linearisation grammar, which relies solely upon information residing in lexical heads to constrain word order. Word order information, which encompasses discontinuity as well as linear precedence conditions, is explicitly encoded as part of the feature structure of lexical heads, thus dispensing with a separate LP specification or 'phenogrammatical' layer standardly posited for linearisation. Instead, such lexicon-originated word order constraints are enforced in projections, propagated upwards and accumulated in the compound PHON feature, which represents phonological yields in an underspecified manner. Though limited somewhat in generative capacity, this approach covers the key phenomena that motivated linearisation grammars and offers a simpler alternative to the standard DOM-oriented theory.
In this contribution we will argue that negative polarity is a collocational phenomenon that does not follow from other properties of the respective lexical elements. With German data as evidence, we will follow a proposal by van der Wouden and treat Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) as collocates which must be licensed by abstract semantic properties of their contexts. Using a collocation module for HPSG, which has been independently motivated for bound words and idioms, we will show how to restrict the occurrence of NPIs to legitimate environments, starting from the negativity hierarchy of licensing environments by Zwarts. Besides a more fine-grained semantic licenser hierarchy, we will establish syntactic licensing domains and general collocational restrictions of NPIs.
We will provide an analysis of negative concord in sentential negation in three languages, French, Polish and German. The focus of the paper is (1) the typological variation with respect to the realization of negative concord in the three languages under investigation and (2) the treatment of lexical exceptions within the different typological classes. We will propose a unified theory of negative concord which identifies a common core system and adds language-specific constraints which can handle typological variation between languages and lexical exceptions within a given language.
This paper attempts to decompose the Motion event into such elements as Figure, Path, Vector, and Ground based upon Talmy's framework, which makes it possible to formally analyze and compare the lexical semantics of the deictic motion verbs within and across languages. It is shown that the difference in interpretations of the Path is attributable to the lexical specifications of both deictic motion verbs and locative phrases. It is argued that deictic motion verbs can be lexically specified for the entailment of arrival only if they express the Path eventually directed to the deictic center. A formal analysis is given based upon the HPSG framework in order to identify the elements of a Motion event contributed by each element of a verb phrase, and to determine the compositional fashion in which they are combined to give the interpretation of the verb phrase as a whole.
The Japanese language is one of the languages where universal and existential quantification are expressed using wh-words with the conjunctive and disjunctive particles, respectively. In this paper, inspired by the syntactic and semantic parallelism found in Japanese between quantification, coordination, and question, we seek to analyze these constructions in a unified fashion. We investigate various phenomena of these constructions and show how these three constructions can be uniformly analyzed as cases where abstracted arguments are questioned or quantified for verbs. We then present an HPSG formalization of the analysis.
It has often been argued that Non-Constituent Coordinations involve ellipsis. Focussing in this paper on so-called 'Argument Cluster Coordination', we provide empirical evidence drawn from French against such elliptical analyses. We then sketch an alternative approach within HPSG, allowing non-standard constituents to be conjoined in the scope of some shared predicate. While such non-standard constituents are generally obtained by relaxing phrase structure, we propose analyzing them as non-headed constructions, deriving their unusual properties from the interplay of two different sets of constraints: those imposed by coordination and those imposed by predicates that select such clusters as arguments.
Situations in which conflicting constraints clash can potentially provide linguists with insights into the architecture of grammar. This paper deals with such a case. When predicative modifiers of morphologically rich languages head relative clauses, they are involved in two, sometimes conflicting, agreement relationships. Different languages adopt different strategies in order to resolve situations of conflicting constraints. This paper focuses on Standard Arabic and the hybrid agreement strategy which it employs. It argues that the HPSG theory of agreement, which distinguishes between morphosyntactic and semantic agreement, constitutes an appropriate framework for accounting for the phenomenon. In addition, it shows that contrary to claims made by Doron and Reintges (2005), a non-derivational framework such as HPSG is adequate for accounting for this non-trivial agreement pattern. Moreover, with a constructional approach, whereby constraints can target syntactic structures above the lexical level, better empirical coverage is achieved.
The purpose of this paper is to consider the proper treatment of short- and long-fronted adjuncts within HPSG. In the earlier HPSG analyses, a rigid link between linear order and constituent structure determines the linear position of such adjuncts in the sentence-initial position. This paper will argue that there is a body of data which suggests that adjunct fronting does not work as these approaches predict. I will then show that linearisation-based HPSG can provide a fairly straightforward account of the facts.
American Sign Language (ASL) has a group of verbs showing agreement with the subject or/and object argument. There has not been analysis on especially number agreement. This paper analyzes person and number agreement within the HPSG framework. I discuss person and number hierarchy in ASL. The argument of agreement verbs can be omitted as in languages like Italian. The constraints on the type agreement-verb have the information on argument optionality.
Russian shows the mixed agreement with the polite pronoun vy and pluralia tantum nouns, both of which have plural number in form but either singular or plural number in meaning. Two different forms of adjectives – short form and long form – agree in different number with those number mismatch nominals.
I adopted the idea of Siegel (1976) etc. that when a long-form adjective appears in the predicate position, there is always a null head that it modifies, with the HPSG's agreement theory of Wechsler & Zlatic (2003). I propose that all predicates – verbs, SF and LF adjectives – except predicate nominals show CONCORD agreement. LF adjectives show CONC agreement with the null anaphor 'one'. The different number values of LF adjectives results from index agreement between the null anaphor and the subject of the sentence.
We study the formal and pragmatic properties of the 'reinforced negation construction' in Italian, which, unlike the regular negative sentence, contains both non and an n-word in preverbal position. On the one hand, this construction relies on a more general construction (positive or negative), which is pragmatically associated with reprise assertion, on the other hand, it uses non without the usual constraints attached to it. We propose that this unfaithful recycling is a pattern for creating a form dedicated to metalinguistic negation. Our analysis integrates both negative types of negative forms with their formal and pragmatic properties.
Since Pollard and Sag (1994) it has been assumed that raising involves full structure sharing, whereas a control verb merely shares the content of one of the lower verb's arguments. This has been considered a property of the phenomena, despite the fact that Pollard and Sag (1994) present this syntactic difference as a hypothesis confirmed for Icelandic only. In this paper we discuss the difference between raising and control from the perspective of Dutch and German passives. It has already been shown by Van Noord and Kordoni (2005) that the secondary object passives in these languages are raising structures, in which the case of the raised argument changes. In this paper we provide additional evidence for the raising analysis, and we propose a new analysis, which allows for a uniform account of Dutch and German passives as raising structures. Przepiorkowski and Rosen (2004) show that control may exhibit case transmission; the data presented in this paper shows that raising may not. Therefore, we claim that the distinction between raising and control is found in theta-role assignment. Syntactically they tend to behave differently, but they may also behave in the exact same way.
Floating affixes in Polish
(2006)
The morphosyntactic status of Polish past tense agreement markers has been a matter of considerable debate in recent years (Spencer 1991, Borsley & Rivero 1994, Borsley 1999, Bański 2000, Kupść 2000, Kupść & Tseng 2005). Past tense agreement is expressed by a set of bound forms that either attach to the past participle, or else float off to a host further to the left. Despite this relative freedom of attachment, it is often noted in the literature, e.g., Borsley 1999, Kupść & Tseng 2005, that the combination of verbal host and agreement marker forms a word-like unit.
In this paper I will argue that these agreement markers are best analysed as affixes uniformly introduced on the verb whose inflectional features they realise. Building on the linearisation-based theory of morphology-syntax interaction proposed in Crysmann 2003, syntactic mobility of morphologically introduced material will be captured by mapping phonological contributions to multiple lexically introduced domain objects. It will be shown that this is sufficient to capture the relevant data, and connect the placement of floating affixes to the general treatment of Polish word order Kupść 2000.
Several analysis of Coordination of Unlikes have been proposed within the HPSG framework. In some of these approaches the possible combinations of 'unlike categories' are encoded in the grammar, while other accounts resort to an independently motivated ellipsis analysis. In this paper we provide further arguments in favor of the latter. However, some problematic cases of Coordination of Unlikes in certain S-adjoining constructions are left unaccounted for. We propose a general analysis of these S-adjoining constructions, and in doing so, the problematic coordination cases are predicted without the need for further assumptions.
The "flexibility" of gender in Tigrinya is uncovered by (i) setting a value for gender for each noun at the lexical level (i.e. bare controllers) and (ii) analysing gender shifts as signals for evaluations (i.e. evaluated controllers). The analysis is formalized as lexical rules which change the value of gend and add an elementary predication in the rels list.
In this paper, we present an analysis of noun phrases with elided nouns that dispenses with the positing of empty categories and preserves the NP structure assumed for NPs with overt nouns, modulo the absence of the head noun. On a par with existing traceless analyses of long distance dependencies, this is proposed as a further step towards a more lean theory of grammar, without phonetically null items.
Languages often require negation to be realized in a prominent position. A well known example is Italian, which seems to require a pre-verbal realization of negation. Some other languages require negation to be in a prominent position but do not require it to be pre-verbal. An example is Swedish. Working within Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), Sells (2000) proposes that Swedish requires a negative element which is not inside VP and that Italian has the same constraint. Similar facts are found in the VSO language Welsh. However, Sellss approach cannot be applied to Welsh. Borsley and Jones (2005) develop a selectional approach to Welsh, in which certain verbs require a negative complement. This works well for Welsh but cannot be applied to Swedish or Italian. A similar approach to all three languages is possible within the linearization-based version of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) developed by Kathol (2000). It seems, then, that a linear approach is preferable to both a structural and a selectional approach.
Metrical phonology in HPSG
(2006)
This paper proposes a new approach to the prosody-syntax interface in HPSG. Previous approaches to prosody in HPSG (Klein, 2000; Haji-Abdolhosseini, 2003) represent prosodic information by constructing metrical constituent structure in the tradition of (Selkirk, 1980; Liberman and Prince, 1977). One drawback of this approach is that it does not allow for a direct representation of purely metrical constraints, which are relegated to an unformalized performance component. By contrast, so called 'grid only' approaches (Prince, 1983; Selkirk, 1984; Delais-Roussarie, 2000) use a single data structure, a metrical grid, to encode prosodic constraints resulting from syntax and constraints of a rhythmic nature.
We first review relevant data from French showing that prosodic constituency is much less constrained by syntactic structure than is predicted by existing approaches. In all but very short utterances, many different prosodic groupings are possible for a given sentence with a determinate information structure, and rhythmic factors determine a preference ordering on the possible groupings. We then present an HPSG implementation of the metrical grid, and propose minimal syntactic constraints on relative prominence, leaving room for noncategorical rythmic constraints to choose between alternatives. We finish by discussing the interaction of the metrical grid with the rest of the prosodic grammar.