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Semantic research over the past three decades has provided impressive confirmation of Donald Davidsons famous claim that “there is a lot of language we can make systematic sense of if we suppose events exist” (Davidson 1980:137). Nowadays, Davidsonian event arguments are no longer reserved only for action verbs (as Davidson originally proposed) or even only for the category of verbs, but instead are widely assumed to be associated with any kind of predicate (e.g. Higginbotham 2000, Parsons 2000).1 The following quotation from Higginbotham and Ramchand (1997) illustrates the reasoning that motivates this move: "Once we assume that predicates (or their verbal, etc. heads) have a position for events, taking the many consequences that stem therefrom, as outlined in publications originating with Donald Davidson (1967), and further applied in Higginbotham (1985, 1989), and Terence Parsons (1990), we are not in a position to deny an event-position to any predicate; for the evidence for, and applications of, the assumption are the same for all predicates. (Higginbotham and Ramchand 1997:54)" In fact, since Davidson’s original proposal the burden of proof for postulating event arguments seems to have shifted completely, leading Raposo and Uriagereka (1995), for example, to the following verdict: "it is unclear what it means for a predicate not to have a Davidsonian argument (Raposo and Uriagereka 1995:182)" That is, Davidsonian eventuality arguments apparently have become something like a trademark for predicates in general. The goal of the present paper is to subject this view of the relationship between predicates and events to real scrutiny. By taking a closer look at the simplest independent predicational structure – viz. copula sentences – I will argue that current Davidsonian approaches tend to stretch the notion of events too far, thereby giving up much of its linguistic and ontological usefulness. More specifically, the paper will tackle the following three questions: 1. Do copula sentences support the current view of the inherent event-relatedness of predicates? 2. If not, what is a possible alternative to an event-based analysis of copula sentences? 3. What does this tell us about Davidsonian events? The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 first reviews current event-based analyses of copula sentences and then gives a brief summary of the Davidsonian notion of events. Section 3 examines the behavior of copula sentences with respect to some standard (as well as some new) eventuality diagnostics. Copula expressions will turn out to fail all eventuality tests. They differ sharply from state verbs like stand, sit, sleep in this respect. (The latter pass all eventuality tests and therefore qualify as true “Davidsonian state” expressions.) On the basis of these observations, section 4 provides an alternative account of copula sentences that combines Kim’s (1969, 1976) notion of property exemplifications with Ashers (1993, 2000) conception of abstract objects. Specifically, I will argue that the copula introduces a referential argument for a temporally bound property exemplification (= “Kimian state”). The proposal is implemented within a DRT framework. Finally, section 5 offers some concluding remarks and suggests that supplementing Davidsonian eventualities by Kimian states not only yields a more adequate analysis for copula expressions and the like but may also improve our treatment of events.
Against split morphology
(2017)
In this paper I present data from several Niger Congo languages, illustrating how the paradigms which make up the noun class systems of these languages are problematic to analyze within traditional morphosyntactic frameworks. I outline possible solutions to this problem, and argue for the introduction of an exemplar based Word and Paradigm (Blevins 2006) approach to morphology within SBCG. I then outline the consequences of this approach for the structure of the SBCG lexicon.
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.
In this paper I explore the logical range of sentential negation types predicted by the theory of HPSG. I find that typological surveys confirm that attested simple negation strategies neatly line up with the types of lexical material given by assuming Lexical Integrity and standard Phrase Structure Grammar dependencies. I then extend the methodology to bipartite negation and derive a space of predicted sentential negation types. I present details of the analysis for each type and relevant examples where possible.
I reconsider the HPSG Raising Principle which is introduced in Pollard & Sag (1994) to constrain the way in which lexical entries describe the SUBCAT lists of the words they license. On the basis of whether a complement is assigned a semantic role in a lexical entry or not, this entry may not or must describe this complement as structure-shared with the unrealised subject of some other (non-subject) complement. The formal status of this principle is still unclear, as it is formulated as a 'meta principle' that does not talk about linguistic objects directly but rather about the lexical entries that license them. I show that, although its meaning cannot be expressed faithfully by the usual kind of constraints employed in HPSG, the Raising Principle can nevertheless be replaced by two such constraints which make largely the same predictions. Most importantly, these constraints interact with the output values of description-level lexical rules in the style of Meurers (2001) in a way that makes predictions available that Pollard & Sag (1994) intended the Raising Principle to make but that it cannot possibly make if description-level lexical rules are employed.
This paper presents an analysis of Danish free relative constructions. Fol- lowing Bresnan and Grimshaw (1978) we will adopt a wh-head (in Danish hv-head) analysis where the hv-phrase is the head of an NP. Also following Bresnan and Grimshaw (1978) we will propose an analysis which does not involve a filler-gap dependency between the hv-phrase and the gap in the sis- ter clause. Instead we will propose that the gap in the sister clause is bound off by a constructional constraint. In this way the analysis will be shown to differ from previous HPSG wh-head analyses of free relatives.
In Müller, 2005 I provide evidence that suggests that linearization approaches that analyze German clause structure with discontinuous constituents cannot account for the German clause structure in an insightful way. In order to eliminate the very powerful concept of linearization domains and discontinuous constituents from the grammar, analyses of other phenomena which also rely on discontinuous constituents should therefore be revised.
In this paper, I develop an analysis of German depictive secondary predicates that differs from the one suggested in Müller, 2002 by assuming binary branching structures, verb movment, and continuous constituents instead of a linearization approach. Some shortcomings of previous analyses are pointed out and it is shown how linearization constraints regarding depictive predicate and antecedent can be modeled.
Our analysis of pseudopartitives and measure phrases draws on the idea of 'of' as a copula in a pseudopartitive. The copular analysis allows us to avoid the complications caused by treating either the numeral-noun combination before the of-phrase or the of-object as the head of a pseudopartitive on agreement, and hence to account for all the agreement patterns without creating any extra rule. We also outline how we can extend our analysis to handle measure phrases that do not co-occur with of-phrases by treating these measure phrases as anaphoric, an analysis that can adapt to the anaphoric constructions in classifier languages. Such an analysis does not only come closer to the intuition of native speakers but also have an appeal from the perspective of the universality of languages.
This paper aims to propose an HPSG analysis for simple and construct-state noun phrases in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). To the best of my knowledge, there are no major HPSG analyses of MSA noun phrases (NPs). A parallel phenomenon in Hebrew has been discussed quite extensively in the same framework by Wintner (2000). Most of the discussion will be devoted for the construct-state noun phrase in which the order of the elements within it is NP AP PP. Three different analyses will be outlined within the HPSG framework: the extra complement analysis, the special complement analysis, and the head-adjunct-complement analysis. These analyses will be evaluated and it will be concluded that the last analysis seems to be the best and the most promising approach to Arabic NPs.
Recent syntactic theory has highlighted the importance of peripheral constructions such as the comparative correlative construction. This construction involves a pair of filler-gap constructions with unusual properties. The first is a subordinate clause and the second a main clause. The construction has a number of related constructions. A version of HPSG, which assumes hierarchies of phrase types, can provide satisfactory analyses both for the comparative correlative constructions and for the related constructions. The two clauses in the comparative-correlative construction can be analysed as non-standard head-filler phrases differing from standard headfiller phrases in certain respects. The construction as a whole can be analyzed as a non-standard head-adjunct phrase, in which the head and the phrase have different categories.
This paper presents a dynamic semantic approach to the licensing of Polarity Sensitive Items (PSIs) and n-words of Negative Concord. We propose that PSIs are unified by the semantic scale property, which is responsible for their sensitivity to the context; we develop a semantic licensing analysis based on Fauconnier's (1975) scales and Ladusaw's (1979) notion of entailment. The first part of the paper concludes with a formalization of semantic licensing in the sense of Ladusaw (1979) within HPSG (see, e.g., Pollard & Sag (1994)) which allows for a uniform treatment of the licensing of PSIs and n-words of Negative Concord and accounts for the disambiguating nature of PSIs in scopally ambiguous sentences.
The second part of the paper is concerned with the limitations of semantic licensing, which, we claim, needs to be sensitive to the context. We present the discussions of, e.g., Heim (1984) and Israel (1996) with respect to the importance of the context in particular licensing constellations, and then turn to linearity constraints on licensing. We present data from German which may not be accounted for by linearity constraints and sketch an analysis for this data which supports the necessity of context-sensitive semantic licensing.
This paper discusses the NP-internal agreement strategies observed in an empirical (corpus based) study of Portuguese, and proposes an analysis which is formalized in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The empirical study suggests that what were previously thought to be rare or non-existent strategies occur with surprising frequency. Capturing these strategies poses problems for many standard approaches to agreement. The formalization shows how they can be captured with a relatively conservative extension of the existing HPSG theory of agreement.
Relative clauses (RCs) in Persian are head-modifying constituents, all typically introduced by the invariant complementizer ke. Persian RCs are Unbounded Dependency Constructions (UDCs), containing either a gap or a resumptive pronoun (RP). In some positions only gaps are allowed, and in other positions only RPs. There are also some positions where both gaps and RPs are alternatively allowed. Illustrating the striking similarities between Persian gaps and RPs, I will provide an HPSG unified approach to take care of the dependency between the licensing structure and the gap/RP with a single mechanism, using only the SLASH feature. Similar to Pollard and Sag s (1994) approach to the bottom of the dependency, I will assume a special sign at the bottom. However, my sign may have a nonempty PHON value. I will introduce a feature called GAPTYPE which is a NONLOCAL feature whose value can be either trace or rp. I will introduce two constraints to capture the pattern of distribution of RPs and traces. At the top of the dependency, I will bind the nonempty SLASH at the complementizer point. I will propose a lexical entry for the complementizer ke that will account for the binding of SLASH by the feature BIND, which has a nonempty set as value.
In this article, the so-called wh-relative clause construction is investigated. The German wh-relative clauses are syntactically relevant as they show both, root clause and subordinate clause properties. They matter semantically because they are introduced by a wh-anaphor that has to be resolved by an appropriate abstract entity of the matrix clause. Additionally, the wh-relative clause construction is discourse-functionally peculiar since it evokes coherence. Besides these interesting empirical characteristics, whrelatives raise important theoretical questions. It is argued that the standard HPSG theory has to be extended to account for non-restrictive relative clauses in general, and to cope with the particular properties of the wh-relative construction.
It has been analyzed that the word order of English comparative inversion is analogous to that of other subject-auxiliary inversions in that only a finite auxiliary verb can be followed by the subject. However, English comparative inversion should be distinguished from other inversions because the subject can be located between a cluster of auxiliary verbs and the non-auxiliary verb phrase in English comparative inversion. Existing analyses on subject-auxiliary inversion cannot account for this special kind of inversion. This paper proposes a new phrase type for English comparative inversion within the construction-based HPSG. In addition, I suggest that constraints on properties of lexemes participating in the new phrase type are governed by the construction-based approach, while the word order of English comparative inversion is determined by rules that the word order domain approach adopts. Also, it will be shown that these proposals can capture the word order of nor-inversion, as-inversion, and so-inversion as well as that of comparative inversion.
This paper describes free relative constructions in Modern Standard Arabic (henceforth, MSA) and aims to provide an HPSG analysis for them. MSA has two types of free relative constructions. One, which is introduced by the complementizer ?allaði, looks just like a relative clause. The other, which is introduced by the elements man and maa, which also appear to be complementizers, does not look like a relative clause. Both types can be analysed in term of unary-branching structures (as NPs consisting just of a CP). In ?allaði free relatives, the NP and the value of SLASH can be coindexed via the value of MOD on the CP. In man and maa free relatives, the NP and the value of SLASH must be coindexed directly.
The use of hand gestures to point at objects and individuals, or to navigate through landmarks on a virtually created map is ubiquitous in face-to-face conversation. We take this observation as a starting point, and we demonstrate that deictic gestures can be analysed on a par with speech by using standard methods from constraint-based grammars such as HPSG. In particular, we use the form of the deictic signal, the form of the speech signal (including its prosodic marking) and their relative temporal performance to derive an integrated multimodal tree that maps to an integrated multimodal meaning. The integration process is constrained via construction rules that rule out ill-formed input. These rules are driven from an empirical corporal study which sheds light on the interaction between speech and deictic gesture.
Order domains were originally proposed to deal with constituent order, but have recently been concerned with more than just linearization. This paper seeks to contribute to this discussion by considering the possibility of analysing word forms in terms of order domains. We focus on the distribution of the English relative and interrogative pronouns who and whom. It is shown that a small number of constraints can accommodate the seemingly complex body of data. In particular, a linearization-based constraint can provide a straightforward account for the quite puzzling distribution which who and whom show in one of the register types.
Welsh is a language in which unbounded dependency constructions involve both gaps and resumptive pronouns (RPs). Gaps and RPs appear in disjoint sets of environments. Otherwise, however, they are quite similar. This suggests that they involve the same mechanism, and in HPSG that they involve the SLASH feature. It is possible to provide an analysis in which RPs are associated with the SLASH feature but are also the ordinary pronouns which they appear to be.