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The paper presents an analysis of control switch in German and Norwegian, as exemplified in the German pair "Ich verspreche ihm zu kommen" 'I promise him to come' vs. "Ich verspreche ihm kommen zu dürfen" 'I promise him to be allowed to come'. The phenomenon is induced by deontic modals in the context of suasive verbs of communication. The analysis is cast both in LFG and HPSG framework, in both cases deploying a pronounced feature-based semantic component. Our core assumption is that a normative agent is computed on top of control relations.
Capturing word order asymmetries in English Left-Peripheral Constructions: A Domain-Based Approach
(2003)
Left-Peripheral Constructions: A Domain-Based Approach Even though the word order in English is rather straightforward, the distributional possibilities of left-peripheral elements like topic phrases, wh-phrases, and negative operators (introducing an SAI) are quite intriguing and complex. In particular, there seems to exist no straightforward way of capturing the linear order asymmetries of these elements in the main and embedded clauses. The prevailing analyses have resorted to movement processes with multiple functional projections. The goal of this paper is to explore an alternative analysis to such movement-based analyses. In particular, this paper adopts the notion of topological fields (DOMAIN) proposed by Kathol (2000, 2001) within the framework of HPSG. The paper shows that within this DOMAIN system, the distributional possibilities as well as the asymmetries we find in English left peripheral constructions can easily follow from the two traditional views: (i) a topic precedes a focus element, and (ii) in English a wh-phrase and a complementizer competes with each other for the same position.
Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar : 2003
(2003)
This paper, in the context of multilingual MT, proposes the use of ICONS (Individual CONstraintS) to add a representation of information structure to MRS. The value of ICONS is a list of objects of type info-str, each of which has the features CLAUSE and TARGET. The subtypes of info-str indicate which information structural role is played by the TARGET with respect to the CLAUSE. This proposal is designed to support both the calculation of focus projection from underspecified representations and the handling of multiclausal sentences.
Yatabe (2021) presents a theory according to which the meaning of a word like 'different' in a sentence like 'Anna and Bill like different films' contains the meaning of a reciprocal pronoun. Since the postulated reciprocal meaning inside the meaning of a word like 'different' requires the presence of a semantic antecedent, the theory entails that the apparent internal reading of a sentence like 'John saw and reviewed different films', which does not contain a plural DP that could serve as the semantic antecedent of the postulated reciprocal meaning, must be licensed in a way that is entirely different from the way in which the internal reading of a sentence like 'Anna and Bill like different films' is licensed. In the present paper, I adduce additional pieces of evidence for this theory. In order to enhance the plausibility of the proposed theory, I also show how the collective interpretation of reciprocals and the interaction of reciprocals and cumulative interpretation can be accounted for within the theory.
Semantic Representations become useful resources for various multilingual NLP applications such as Machine Translation, Multilingual Generation, cross Lingual QA, to name a few. No Semantic Representation, to our knowledge, adopts vivakṣā (Speaker's intention) as a guiding principle for the representation. This motivates us to develop a new Semantic Representation system – "Universal Semantic Representation (USR)" – following Indian Grammatical Tradition (IGT) and Paninian grammar. Since USR is designed to be language-independent, we have currently taken up the task of generating English, Hindi, Tamil and Bangla from the USR. For English generation, the USR is mapped to ERG meaning representation (Flickinger, D. 1999) which is couched in Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS). We use an off-the-shelf ACE generator that uses ERG as a resource-grammar for generating English. While designing the transfer module from USR to ERG-based MRS, we came across various Abstract Predicates (APs) in MRS representation as described in ErgSemantics_Basic (Flickinger et al., 2014). These APs are used to represent the semantic contribution of grammatical constructions or more specialized lexical entries such as compounding or the comparative use of more and so on. This paper presents the strategy for postulating the APs from the information given in USR and then reports the implementation of the transfer module keeping the focus on the postulation of APs. We get around 95% accuracy in postulating APs from USRs.
Soranî Kurdish can reference up to two arguments morphologically, a subject agreement marker and an incorporated object pronoun. One of the argument referencing morphs is verb-bound and occurs in a fixed position in the verb template (after the stem), while the other is a mobile morph that can occur either verb-internally (in second or last position) or verb externally. Either the subject agreement marker or the object incorporated pronoun can be verb bound or mobile morphs, depending on the tense and presence of an NP complement. Previous literature has analyzed mobile morphs as (VP) endoclitics. We argue that this is not the case as verb-external mobile morphs occur at the end of the last word of the least oblique NP complement and cannot attach to the last word of VP-internal PPs. We provide an edge-feature based analysis of verb-external mobile morphs and show that the same realizational rules account for the exponents of mobile morph features whether they occur verb-internally or verb-externally. We furthermore suggest that the dissociation between paradigm class (verb-bound or mobile morph) and syntactic status (subject or object; agreement marker vs. incorporated pronoun) challenges views that treat morphological structure as isomorphic to syntactic structure.
The paper examines borrowed instances of what we call emphatic superlative ever (ES-ever) into two Germanic languages (Dutch and German) and two Romance languages (French and Spanish). We base our study on extensive corpus data. We model the data in three stages ranging from constructional borrowing (Stage-1: el coolest job ever 'the coolest job ever'), via diaconstructions (Stage-2: la mejor canción ever 'the best song ever'), up to lexical borrowing (Stage-3: las portadas más photoshopeadas ever 'the most photoshoped portals ever'). We extend an earlier approach to social meaning in HPSG to borrowing.
How things become red in Mandarin Chinese? A case study of deadjectival change of state predicates
(2023)
This paper provides an HPSG analysis for the morphosyntax and the semantics of deadjectival change of state (CoS) verbs in Mandarin Chinese. We first show that adjectives are a distinct word class from verbs in Mandarin Chinese and argue for the derivation of CoS verbs from property concept adjectives. We then model this derivation with a lexical rule. Finally, since CoS verbs can be combined with another verb to form a resultative verb compound (RVC) to express caused CoS, we also propose a lexical rule to account for RVCs.
Maliseet-Passamaquoddy (Algonquian, New Brunswick and Maine, MP) employs a set of enclitic particles to express tense, aspect, and various adverbial notions. These occupy second position in a clause: they follow either the first word in the clause or the first constituent. Johnson and Rosen (2015) propose an analysis of clitic placement in Menominee (Algonquian, Wisconsin) that takes clitics to occupy a functional head in the left periphery, postulating movement of one item into a specifier position to the left of this functional head, thus leaving the clitics in second position. Here I propose an alternative account for MP in the framework of Sign-Based Phrase Structure Grammar (Sag 2012) that makes no use of functional heads and postulates no movement operations. Instead, clitic positions are determined by a small number of maximally simple constructional statements.
Murrinh-Patha, a polysynthetic Non-Pama-Nyungan language of Australia features competition of subject and object agreement markers for a particular position (i.e. slot 2), meaning that certain subject agreement markers are realised in this position, unless already occupied by overt object agreement markers. In their typology of variable morphotactics, Crysmann & Bonami (2016) cite the case of Murrinh-Patha as an instance of misaligned, conditioned placement. I shall propose a formal account of this positional competition in Murrinh-Patha within Information-based Morphology. To this end, I shall generalise the "pivot" features previously proposed for placement relative to the stem (Italian; Crysmann & Bonami, 2016) or the edge (Soranî Kurdish; Bonami & Crysmann, 2013; Salehi & Koenig, 2023) and show how this will facilitate the treatment of conditioned placement in Murrinh-Patha.
A number of types of Welsh subordinate clause are introduced by what looks like the preposition 'i' 'to', 'for'. Earlier research has shown that there are three different lexemes here. It is not unusual for a language to have homophonous lexemes, but these lexemes share a variety of properties, and also share properties with the preposition 'i'. The similarities and the differences among these lexemes can be captured if they are grouped together as four different realisations of a single 'super-lexeme' within the hierarchical lexicon.
The theory of respectively interpretation proposed in Yatabe and Tam (2021) "In defense of an HPSG-based theory of non-constituent coordination" (Linguistics and Philosophy 44, pp. 1-77) entails that Binding Conditions A and B need to be formulated as constraints on the form of semantic representations. It is possible to formulate the two binding conditions as such constraints if anaphoric relations are encoded in semantic representations in a way analogous to the way they are encoded in Discourse Representation Theory.
How to be a ham sandwich or an eel: The English deferred equative and the Japanese eel sentence
(2022)
In some languages including English and Japanese, a nominal predicate construction (NPC; "NP1 is NP2") has a marked variety—"open-ended-relation NPCs" (ONPCs), to label it—where the referents of the subject NP and the predicate NP are understood to be in some pragmatically prominent relation other than identity or inclusion (e.g. I'm the ham sandwich 'I'm the customer who ordered the ham sandwich'). The Japanese ONPC has been called the "eel sentence (eel construction)", after an oft-cited example involving unagi 'eel' as its predicate NP. The English ONPC is discussed in good detail by Ward (2004; "Equatives and deferred reference", Language 80) under the rubric of the "deferred equative". The ONPCs in the two languages can be naturally used only under limited discourse configurations, with the English one being more severely constrained than the Japanese one. This work develops semantic analyses of the two ONPCs that improve on previous accounts.
This paper considers Chinese quantifier scope, an important, outstanding area of Chinese linguistics. In particular, there are two open questions on the subject: (1) the guiding principles that determine (a) the scopal readings of quantifiers and (b) the sometimes mandatory co-occurrence of the universal quantifier mei (every) and the universal adverb dou, and (2) the semantic functions of mei and dou and their connection to the co-occurrence of these words.
We reappraise three prior accounts of these subjects, reason through their consequences on some exemplary data, offer a new explanation based upon concord, a mechanism that is commonplace in many languages, and formulate it in lexical resource semantics (LRS). We use two principles adapted from Richter and Sailer's (2004) analysis of negative concord, expanded with a new quantifier order constraint to generate a coherent answer to the two aforementioned questions.
Computational Grammars can be adapted to detect ungrammatical sentences, effectively transforming them into error detection (or correction) systems. In this paper we provide a theoretical account of how to adapt implemented HPSG grammars for grammatical error detection. We discuss how a single ungrammatical input can be reconstructed in multiple ways and, in turn, be used to provide specific, high-quality feedback to language learners. We then move on to exemplify this with a few of the most common error classes made by learners of Mandarin Chinese. We conclude with some notes concerning the adaptation and implementation of the methods described here in ZHONG, an open-source HPSG grammar for Mandarin Chinese.
In this paper, we deal with register-driven variation from a probabilistic perspective, as proposed in Schäfer, Bildhauer, Pankratz, Müller (2022). We compare two approaches to analyse this variation within HPSG. On the one hand, we consider a multiple-grammar approach and combine it with the architecture proposed in the CoreGram project Müller (2015) - discussing its advantages and disadvantages. On the other hand, we take into account a single-grammar approach and argue that it appears to be superior due to its computational efficiency and cognitive plausibility.
This paper investigates the variation of resultative serial verb constructions in Benue-Kwa languages. The main claim is that the variation can be explained assuming three versions of general lexicon rules which turn main verbs into complex predicates selecting for a second verb and attracting its arguments. Each language has a language specific version of these lexicon rules, enriched with language specific peculiarities to account for the specific behaviour of verbal inflection. The fact that not all of the lexicon rules do operate in each languages is another source of variation.
In this paper, I shall discuss a peculiar coordination construction in German, where the shared subject of the two conjuncts is not found peripheral, but is contained within the first conjunct. Following Höhle (1983), this construction is called "Subject Gaps in Finite/Fronted" clauses (SGF). I shall discuss previous accounts, both symmetric coordination approaches (Frank, 2002; Kathol, 1999), as well as asymmetric adjunction approaches (Büring & Hartmann, 1998). The analysis I shall propose will treat the construction as coordination semantically, yet assume a head complement structure that combines the licensing first conjunct with an incomplete (=slashed) coordinate structure complement. I shall show how this addresses the ATB condition, permits straightforward licensing of the subject gap, and provides better control over the second conjunct, thereby improving over the adjunct analysis.
Welsh noun phrases have had much less attention than Welsh clauses, and there are unresolved issues about the nature of possessors, attributive adjectives, and the definite article and agreement clitics. There is evidence, especially from agreement, that possessors are complements, evidence that attributive adjectives are adjoined to a preceding [LEX+] nominal constituent, and evidence that the definite article and agreement clitics are specifiers. The last of these positions makes it fairly simple to capture the relation between the definite article and agreement clitics and possessors. It is not difficult to formalize these ideas within HPSG.
The paper looks at constraints on non-wh relatives in Sorani Kurdish (Iranian) and English (Germanic). We argue that some of them are grammatical, whereas others introduce social meaning. We present a basic, lexicalist syntactic analysis and expand it with social meaning constraints. We propose that classical sociolinguistic variables have the status of conventional implicatures and the overall assessment of a style is treated as a particularized conversational implicature.
This paper considers the role of nonlocal amalgamation in a system of analyses for typologically diverse languages. Nonlocal amalgamation (Bouma et al. 2001) was suggested in particular to get rid of extraction rules in Pollard and Sag's (1994) analysis of long-distance dependencies. However, in implemented projects like the English Resource Grammar (Flickinger, 2000, 2011) and the Grammar Matrix (Bender et al., 2002, 2010), the extraction rules have been maintained, while nonlocal amalgamation is used for the analysis of phenomena like the easy-adjectives. Zamaraeva and Emerson (2020) argue that, if extraction rules are kept, then supporting the English easy-adjectives may be an insufficient reason to maintain nonlocal amalgamation in a cross-linguistic system like the Grammar Matrix, as it complicates the analysis of multiple question word fronting with flexible word order (in languages such as Russian [rus]). However, I present here a case of morphological marking of questions (in languages like Makah [myh]) which further motivates nonlocal amalgamation, as the analysis is remarkably more simple with it than it is without it. An analysis of morphological marking of questions needs to be part of a cross-linguistic system such as the Grammar Matrix as well as an analysis of multiple fronting, which adds a new tension at the level of the Matrix "core" and provides concrete material for discussion of issues ranging from empirical implementation of theoretical ideas like nonlocal amalgamation to the big question of how much of typological space a single system of grammar is expected to cover.
It is a typologically well-attested generalization that simple personal pronouns are avoided when the purpose is to signal semantic identity between coarguments of a predicate (Faltz, 1985; Comrie, 1999; Levinson, 2000; Haspelmath, 2008, forthcoming; Volkova & Reuland, 2014). Many linguists assume what I call the Unified View, where these pronoun disjointness effects come out as a byproduct of a single syntactic constraint, generally known as Principle B of the Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981, 1986; Pollard & Sag, 1994; Manning & Sag, 1998; Pollard, 2005; Müller, 2021). This paper argues that the Unified View is mistaken because it is both too weak and too strong. As an alternative, I propose that pronoun disjointness effects stem from a conspiracy of three distinct factors – none of which is a syntactic universal: (i) a preference for expressing identity with coindexation rather than anchoring distinct indices to the same referent (Reinhart, 1983); (ii) a language-specific variant of HPSG’s Principle B; and (iii) a constraint on the morphosyntactic encoding of reflexive relations (Faltz, 1985; Reinhart & Reuland, 1993; König & Siemund, 2000).
In this paper, we propose to extend the Przepiórkowski's 2000 analysis of Long Distance Genitive of Negation to the same phenomenon in Lithuanian. We discuss the features that have their origin in Categorial Grammar. We then develop a novel analysis of the case alternation in Categorial Grammar incorporating features of the HPSG analysis. The two accounts show a surprising convergence in basic assumptions and predictions.
The formal analysis of idioms has been oscillating between approaches that emphasize the unit-like character of idioms and approaches that focus on the autonomy of the idioms' parts. In this paper, we summarize the main arguments for and against these two positions to then propose an account that tries to capture and combine the insights and advantages of both types of analysis. The resulting theory is heavily influenced by the approach taken in Riehemann (2001).
Minimizer strong NPIs such as ''lift a finger'' are known to be more restricted in their occurrence than weak NPIs like ''ever''. Sedivy 1990 points to contexts with a ''negative side message'' in which ''lift a finger'' can occur but ''ever'' cannot. The paper provides a short overview over the relevant contexts and proposes an extension of a representational theory of NPI licensing with the following components: First, an utterance content is introduced that enriches the primary truth-conditional content by conventional implicatures and generalized conversational implicatures. Second, ''ever''-type NPIs can be licensed by weak NPI licensors, but only in the primary truth-conditional meaning of an utterance. ''Lift-a-finger''-type NPIs can only be licensed in the scope of negation, but the licensing can be checked at the representation of the enriched meaning of an utterance.
The aim of this paper is to propose three improvements to the HPSG model theory. The first is a solution to certain formal problems identified in Richter 2007. These problems are solved if HPSG models are rooted models of utterances and not exhaustive models of languages, as currently assumed. The proposed solution is compatible with all existing views on the nature of objects inhabiting models. The second improvement is a solution to "Höhle’s Problem", i.e., the problem of massive spurious ambiguities in models of utterances. The third is a formalisation of Yatabe's (2004) analysis of the coordination of unlike categories, one that requires a second-order extension of the language for stating HPSG grammars.