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This paper discusses a special kind of syntax-semantics mismatch: a noun with a relative clause is interpreted as if it were a complement clause. An analysis in terms of Lexical Resource Semantics is developed which provides a uniform account for ''normal'' relative clauses and for the discussed type of relative clause.
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.
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.
This paper presents the results of two experiments in German testing the acceptability of (non-)restrictive relative clauses (NRCs/RRCs) with split antecedents (SpAs). According to Moltmann (1992), SpAs are only grammatical if their parts occur within the conjuncts of a coordinate structure and if they have identical grammatical functions. Non-conjoined SpAs that form the subject and the object of a transitive verb are predicted to be ungrammatical. Our study shows that the acceptability of such examples improves significantly if the predicate that relates the parts of the SpA is symmetric. Moreover, it suggests that NRCs and RRCs behave differently in these cases with respect to the SpA-construal. We can make sense of this observation if we follow Winter (2016) in assuming that transitive symmetric predicates have to be analyzed as unary collective predicates and thus provide a collective antecedent for the RC at the semantic (not the syntactic) level. As we will argue, this accounts for some of the disagreement we found in the literature and gives us new insights into both the semantics of symmetric predicates and the semantics of NRCs.
Negative Polarity Items (NPI) are expressions such as English 'ever' and 'lift a finger' that only occur in sentences that are somehow negative. NPIs have puzzled linguists working in syntax, semantics and pragmatics, but no final conclusion as to which module of the grammar should be responsible for the licensing has been reached. Within HPSG interest in NPI has developed only relatively recently and is mainly inspired by the entailment-based approach of Ladusaw 1980 and Zwarts 1997. Since HPSG's CONTENT value is a semantic representation, the integration of such a denotational theory cannot be done directly. Adopting Discourse Representation Theory (DRT, Kamp and Reyle 1993, von Genabith et al. 2004) I show that it is possible to formulate a theory of NPI licensing that uses purely representational notions. In contrast to most other frameworks in semantics, DRT attributes theoretical significance to the representation of meaning, i.e. to a logical form, and not only to the denotation itself. This makes DRT particularly well-suited to my purpose.
In the Cognate Object Construction (COC) a typically intransitive verb combines with a postverbal noun phrase whose head noun is morphologically or semantically cognate to the verb. I will argue that English has a family of COCs which consists of four different types. The COCs share common core properties but differ with respect to some of their syntactic and semantic properties. I will capture the ''cognateness'' between the verb and the noun in all COCs by token identities at the level of their lexical semantic contribution. I will use an inheritance hierarchy on lexical rule sorts to model the family relations among the different COC types.
In this paper we investigate German idioms which contain phraseologically fixed clauses (PCl). To provide a comprehensive HPSG theory of PCls we extend the idiom theory of Soehn 2006 in such a way that it can distinguish different degrees of regularity in idiomatic expressions. An in-depth analysis of two characteristic PCls shows how our two-dimensional theory of idiomatic expressions can be applied and illustrates the scope of the theory.
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.
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 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).