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Case is traditionally approached as a lexical phenomenon in HPSG. The LinGO Grammar Matrix customization system, an HPSG-based grammar engineering toolkit and also a typological meta-resource, includes several options for case assignment, and one of them, 'focus case', assumes that case of the participants in basic clauses is handled via lexical rules rather than lexical entries. This phenomenon was previously only attributed to a group of Austronesian languages, and thus the focus case differed from all other case options in the Matrix which were attested for across language families. Our analysis of Kolyma Yukaghir, a nearly extinct language of North-Eastern Russia, shows that focus case can be successfully used outside of Austronesian family and therefore that the option is more universal than it was previously thought.
In Dutch, adpositions can be stranded, typically if their complement is an R-pronoun. The complement usually appears in the left part of the Mittelfeld or in the Vorfeld. In HPSG this is canonically modeled in terms of extraction, making use of nonlocal devices such as SLASH and BIND. This paper argues that the extraction analysis is indeed appropriate for cases in which the complement is realised in the Vorfeld, but proposes an alternative for the cases in which the complement is realised in the Mittelfeld. The new treatment is based on argument inheritance, as complement raising in the Mittelfeld involves a middle distance dependency rather than a long distance dependency.
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.
In this paper we argue that, despite a lack of morphological markers on its negators, Nanti shows syntactic evidence for two negation strategies in the main clause: head negation and modifier negation. The head negator motivates the construction of a hierarchy of forms, and the interaction of the main clause negators motivates an additional head feature. We then extend the analysis to a previously unconsidered negator in the language. Finally, our analysis is implemented and tested in a grammar based on the LinGO Grammar Matrix.
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.
Impairment in past tense production as well as interaction between tense and aspect have been found in both fluent and non-fluent aphasia (e.g. Dragoy & Bastiaanse, 2013). Inflection has been found to be relatively preserved in semantic dementia (SD) (Thompson et al., 2012). The aims of the present study are a) to compare the morphosyntactic abilities of patients with aphasia and SD in tense and aspect marking and b) to explore the interaction of lexical (+/- telic) and grammatical (perfective/imperfective) aspect in aphasia and SD. A sentence completion task was administered to 30 native speakers of Greek: 10 patients with aphasia (6 anomic, 2 Wernicke and 2 agrammatic), 10 age and education-matched controls, 5 patients with SD and 5 controls. The material consisted of unergative, unaccusative and transitive verbs (12 of each verb class) and the participants had to apply present (imperfective) and past (perfective) tense. Unergative and unaccusative verbs differ in terms of their aspectual properties with the unergative being [-telic], and unaccusative [+telic]. Transitive verbs vary. A principal distinction between the tested conditions was the standard ummarked combination ([+telic] verbs in past perfective and [–telic] verbs in present imperfective) vs. the marked one ([+telic] verbs in present imperfective and [–telic] in past perfective). Both control groups performed at ceiling in all conditions. Aphasic participants were significantly more impaired than the control group in all conditions. SD participants were significantly more impaired than the controls only in the production of present tense (M-W U= 1.5, p= 0.024). There was no difference between past perfective and present imperfective for neither group, but there was an interaction between verb class and tense for the aphasic participants, as performance in unaccusative verbs in past perfective (unmarked condition) was significantly better than in unergatives in past perfective (marked condition) (Z=2.512, p=0.012) but performance in unaccusatives in present imperfective (marked condition) was significantly worse than performance in unergatives in present imperfective (unmarked condition) (Z=2.680, p=0.004). In sum, aphasic participants performed significantly better in the unmarked than in the marked conditions. Such an interaction was not found for the SD group. Aphasic participants performed significantly worse than the SD subjects in past perfective tense (M-W U= 7.5, p=0.029) in total, and the difference was significant only for unaccusative verbs (M-W U= 6.5, p=0.021), although both groups performed very well in this condition. There was no difference in present, neither for each verb class separately nor for the total score. A general past tense deficit cannot be upheld for either group. Rather, SD participants appear relatively impaired in producing present tense. We argue for slight morphosyntactic impairment in SD, although with a different underlying cause than in aphasia. Moreover, our data suggest an effect of aspectual markedness in aphasia but not in SD. We discuss this finding in the light of the different neuropathology of the two populations.
Die Gründerinnen des Arbeitskreises für spätmittelalterliche Wirtschaftsgeschichte Julia Bruch (Köln), Ulla Kypta (Frankfurt am Main) und Tanja Skambraks (Mannheim) luden vom 15. bis zum 16. November zu einer ersten Konferenz mit dem Titel "Neue Methoden der spätmittelalterlichen Wirtschaftsgeschichte" ein. In ihrer Begrüßungs- und Einführungsrede verwies ULLA KYPTA (Frankfurt am Main) auf die Methodenvielfalt in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften und die Schwierigkeiten bei der adäquaten Auswahl und dem sinnvollen Gebrauch derselben innerhalb der Wirtschaftsgeschichte. So bedinge die Anwendung von wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Modellen immer wieder die Konfrontation mit den empirischen Quellenbefunden. Neben den wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen seien die sozial- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Ansätze ebenfalls in das Methodenspektrum der Wirtschaftshistoriker aufzunehmen. ...
Der Frankfurter Tag der Rechtspolitik inszeniert sich mittlerweile als traditionsreich. Seit dreiundzwanzig Jahren, weiß Rudolf Steinberg, ehemaliger Präsident der Universität Frankfurt und Redner an diesem Tage, ist die Veranstaltung in der Welt und nennt als maßgeblichen Geburtshelfer: sich selbst. Vanité oblige. Dabei vergisst er zu erwähnen, dass die Frankfurter Tage der Rechtspolitik nach und nach auf einen halben Arbeitstag zusammengeschrumpft sind und in der Vergangenheit nicht selten einen so trüben Eindruck machten, dass man dazu überging, über Prüfungsandrohung Druck auf Studierende auszuüben, die mittlerweile die Reihen füllen, was heißt: Komparsenrollen einnehmen. Es reden und diskutieren andere. ...