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This papers addresses information-structural restrictions on the occurrence of what is known as "multiple fronting" in German. Multiple fronting involves the realization of (what appears to be) more than one constituent in the first position of main clause declaratives, a clause type that otherwise respects the verb-second constraint of German. Relying on a large body of naturally occurring instances of multiple fronting with the surrounding discourse context, we show that in certain contexts, multiple fronting is fully grammatical in German, in contrast to what has sometimes been claimed previously. Examination of this data reveals two different patterns, which we analyze in terms of two distinct constructions, each instantiating a specific pairing of form, meaning and contextual appropriateness.
A little discussed feature of English are non-restrictive relative clauses in which the antecedent is normally not an NP and the gap follows an auxiliary, as in Kim will sing, which Lee won't. These relative clauses resemble clauses with auxiliary complement ellipsis or fronting. There are a variety of analyses that might be proposed, but there are reasons for thinking that the best analysis is one where which is a nominal filler associated with a gap which is generally non-nominal: a filler-gap mismatch analysis in other words.
This paper addresses the form-meaning relation of multimodal communicative actions by means of a grammar that combines verbal input with hand gestures. Unlike speech, gesture signals are interpretable only through their semantic relation to the synchronous speech content. This relation serves to resolve the incomplete meaning that is revealed by gestural form alone. We demonstrate that by using standard linguistic methods, speech and gesture can be integrated in a constrained way into a single derivation tree which maps to a uniform meaning representation.
Does chain hybridization in Irish support movement-based approaches to long-distance dependencies?
(2010)
Huybregts (2009) makes the claim that hybrid A'-chains in Irish favor derivational theories of syntax over representational ones such as HPSG. In this paper, we subject this assertion to closer scrutiny. Based on a new technical proposal, we will reach the conclusion that, in principle, both derivational and representational accounts can accomodate hybrid dependencies. Thus, no argument against either approach can be made on the basis of the Irish data, disconfirming Huybregts's (2009) claim.
The analysis of the copula as a semantically vacuous word in mainstream HPSG is appropriate for some of its uses, such as the progressive and the passive, but not for its use in clauses with a predicative complement. In such clauses the copula denotes a relation of coreference between the indices of the subject and the predicative complement.
This paper explores the use of HPSG for modeling historical phonological change and grammaticalization, focusing on the evolution of the pronunciation of word-final consonants in Modern French. The diachronic evidence is presented in detail, and interpreted as two main transitions, first from Old French to Middle French, then from Middle French to the modern language. The data show how the loss of final consonants, originally a phonological development in Middle French, gave rise to the grammaticalized external sandhi phenomenon known as consonant liaison in modern French. The stages of development are analyzed formally as a succession of HPSG lexical schemas in which phonological representations are determined by reference to the immediately following phonological context.
The paper aims to present approach to HPSG phonology which would account for underlying forms of phonemes. It shows some of the issues arising in monostratal analyses of phonology, and proposes a solution based on a notion of underlying representations. The approach presented, partly inspired by Optimality Theory, resolves cases of neutralisation and opacity by formulating constraints which either restrict the surface representation or relate it to the underlying form.
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.
This paper discusses ergative case assignment in Hindi and its interaction with aspectual verb complexes or complex predicate constructions. It is shown that ergative case is assigned by the last head in the aspectual verb complex and that ergative case on the subject of intransitive verbs denoting bodily-functions is associated with a counter-to-expectation meaning. It is then shown that aspect complex predicates in Hindi involve two distinct syntactic structures, which have similar semantics. While one syntactic structure involves argument composition, the other involves a head-modifier structure. It is argued that the existence of two structures favor approaches to the interface between syntax and semantics which do not require a uniform isomorphism between the semantics and syntax of aspect.
Preposed negation in Danish
(2009)
In Danish the base position of the negation and negated quantifier phrases is between the subject and the finite verb in embedded clauses. However, in embedded clauses introduced by a non-veridical complementizer such as hvis ('if') or om ('whether') the negation and negated quantifier phrases can also appear between the complementizer and the subject. This phenomenon is referred to as preposed negation. The paper investigates the structure and semantics of this construction. It is argued that preposed negation is no adjunction structure, but a special construction where the negation element is a sister of the complementizer and the filler of a filler-gap-structure. It is further argued that preposed negation is associated with negated verum-focus of a clause lacking an (aboutness-) topic. The negation of a verum predicate explains why preposed negation fails to license strong negative polarity items and to rule out positive ones. The lack of a topic explains why preposed negation is preferred with non-referential subjects and with weak readings of indefinite subjects and why preposed negation is incompatible with topic-binding particles.The final section presents an HPSG-analysis of preposed negation using Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS).
The present paper gives an account of Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) in Mandarin Chinese. After a typological presentation of the phenomenon, we give an overview of the Chinese data with examples of the semantic variations of SVCs. The inventory of SVC types is classified according to causal and temporal relations between the components. We also discuss the pragmatic conditions on the use of SVCs as well as alternative, semantically equivalent constructions. A HPSG-analysis is proposed for marked SVCs, which uses the interaction between aspect marking and the set of possible subordinative relations to deduce the extra-lexical meaning of the construction. Particular attention is payed to the syntactically peculiar SVC with shared internal arguments, which is accounted for by a non-cancellation approach to valence requirements.
On predication
(2009)
This paper discusses copula constructions in English, German, and Danish and argues that a uniform analysis of all copula constructions is inappropriate. I provide evidence from German that there should be a raising variant of the copula in addition to an identificational copula. A unary schema is provided that maps referential NPs that can be used as arguments onto predicational NPs. Data from Danish shows that predicational NPs can be subjects in specificational structures. An account for such specificational structures is provided and the different behaviour of predicational and specificational structures with regard to question tags is explained. A similar contrast can be found in German left dislocation structures, which follows from the assumptions made in this paper.
A modified treatment of complex predicate formation allows for a reduction of selectional features (that is abolishing of xcomp or vcomp) and for a uniform treatment of predicational phrases in copula constructions and resultative secondary predicates. This yields an account for constituent order variants that remained unexplained by earlier analyses.
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 analyzes the interrelation of two understudied phenomena of English: discontinuous modifier phenomenon (so willing to help out that they called early; more ready for what was coming than I was) and the complex pre-determination phenomenon (this delicious a lasagna; How hard a problem (was it)?). Despite their independence, they frequently occur intertwined, as in too heavy {a trunk} (for me) to lift and so lovely a melody that some people cried. This paper presents a declarative analysis of these and related facts that avoids syntactic movement in favor of monotonic constraint satisfaction. It demonstrates how an explicit, sign-based, constructional approach to grammatical structure captures linguistic generalizations, while at the same time accounting for idiosyncratic facts in this seemingly complex grammatical domain.
In this paper we develop an HPSG syntax-semantics of negative concord in Romanian. We show that n-words in Romanian can best be treated as negative quantifiers which may combine by resumption to form polyadic negative quantifiers. Optionality of resumption explains the existence of simple sentential negation readings alongside double negation readings. We solve the well-known problem of defining general semantic composition rules for translations of natural language expressions in a logical language with polyadic quantifiers by integrating our higher-order logic in Lexical Resource Semantics, whose constraint-based composition mechanisms directly support a systematic syntax-semantics for negative concord with polyadic quantification.
The paper discusses the so-called adverbial use of the wh-pronoun was ('what'), which establishes a non-standard interrogative construction type in German. It argues that the adverbial use of was ('what') is based on the lexical properties of a categorically deficient pronoun was ('what'), which bears a causal meaning. In addition, adverbial was ('what') differs from canonical argument was ('what') as it is analyzed as a functor which is generated in clause-initial position.
By means of empirical facts mainly provided by d'Avis (2001) it is shown that was ('what') behaves ambivalently regarding the wh-property: On the one hand, was ('what') can introduce an interrogative clause, but on the other hand it cannot license wh-phrases in situ. While formally analyzing the data against the background of existing accounts on wh-interrogatives couched in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, an analysis is developed that separates two pieces of information to keep track of the wh-information percolating in an interrogative clause. Whereas the WH-value models wh-fronting and pied-piping phenomena, the QUE value links syntactic and semantic information and thus keeps track of wh-phrases in-situ.
We address three properties of Turkish morphology and VP coordination: the identification of tense and aspect values across conjuncts, the optional omission of affixes on non-final conjuncts coordinated with the word ve and the obligatory sharing of scopal modals across conjuncts in coordination structures with the affix -ip. For the modals in an -ip structure, we propose an analysis that uses syntactic features to trigger the application of a construction at the level of the coordinated VP introducing the scopal predications. Our analysis is implemented in a small HPSG grammar and tested against datasets confirming the functionality and consistency of the analysis.
Although the original framework of HPSG is mostly compatible with independent theoretical claims or analyses in lexical lexeme base morphology (Anderson 1992, Aronoff & Fudeman 2004, Beard 1995, Booij 2005, Carstairs-McCarthy 1992, Fradin 2003, Haspelmath 2002, Matthews 1991, Plag 2003, for example), so far, most research in morphology has been done on inflexional phenomena (Orgun & Inkelas 2002, Bonami & Boyé 2006), and few on derivational morphology (Koenig 1999, Riehemann 1998). Yet, we believe it is worth investigating how the formal and theoretical apparatus of HPSG deals with capturing multilevel constraints that apply in the lexeme formation of French Verb-Noun nominal compounds, such as as GRILLE-PAIN (lit. grill-bread, 'toaster'), PERCE-OREILLE (lit. pierce-ear, 'earwig'), TOURNEVIS (lit. turn-screw, 'screwdriver'), or LÈCHE-VITRINE (lit. lick-window, 'window-shopping'). Contrary to what has often been said, we argue VN lexemes formation comes under morphological constraints but not under syntactic mechanisms. Our analysis integrates VN lexemes into a multiple-dimension typed-hierarchy of lexemes and provides an account for semantic generalizations involved in different types of lexeme formation (compounding, derivation, and conversion).
In this paper, I discuss the case and agreement system of Nias, a language that has been described as a marked-absolutive system by various authors (Donohue and Brown, 1999; Corbett, 2006; Cysouw, 2005; Handschuh, 2008; Wichmann, 2005). I shall argue in particular that the ergativity of this language is highly superficial in nature, showing that hypothesised marked-absolutive arguments fail to display typical subject properties. Extending the linking theory of ergativity by Manning (1994) and Manning and Sag (1999), which assumes an inverse linking pattern for transitive, I shall suggest that Nias transitives are best analysed as a Nominative-Accusative system, attributing the ergative split in Nias to an inverse linking of intransitives instead. Under this perspective, case, agreement, and word order will receive a natural explanation.
Previous HPSG accounts of extraction blur the distinction between valents and adjuncts by allowing verbs to lexically control the modifiers that combine with their phrasal projections. However, assuming that adjuncts are valents runs into various difficulties. This paper argues that the distinction between complements and adjuncts can be maintained, and that certain semantic phenomena that challenge traceless theories of extraction can be seen as an instance of a more general process. Finally, this paper also discusses a uniform mechanism for case assignment to valents and adverbial nominals.
Modern Persian conjugation makes use of five periphrastic constructions. We contrast the properties of these five constructions and argue that they call for different analyses. We propose contrasting analyses relying on the combination of an HPSG approach to feature geometry and syntactic combination, and an approach to paradigm organization and morphological exponence based on Paradigm Function Morphology. This combination of analytic tools allows us to treat the whole array of periphrastic constructions as lexical in origin—no phrasal construction or multi-word lexical entry of any kind is required.
French and Romanian verbless relative adjuncts are incidental adjuncts which have been described as elliptical relative clauses. We show that this analysis is not empirically adequate and propose an alternative non-elliptical analysis. We analyze verbless relative adjuncts as sentential fragments whose head can be a cluster of phrases. They are marked by a functor phrase which displays selection properties with respect to the head phrase and makes an essential contribution to the semantics of the adjunct. The analysis relies on the interaction of grammatical constraints introduced by various linguistic objects, as well as on a constructional analysis of verbless relative adjuncts distinguishing several subtypes.
Transparent free relatives (TFRs) are constituents involving a WH-gap dependency in which the phrase that is predicated of the gap associated with 'what', not the wh-phrase itself, functions as the syntactic and semantic "nucleus." Previous analyses have either treated TFRs as a construction radically different from ordinary FRs, utilizing such mechanisms as parenthetical placement or grafts, or assimilated them to ordinary FRs, relying on abstract/empty head elements and a vague semantic relation holding between the gap and the predicate phrase. In this paper, we investigate how the puzzling properties of English TFRs can be accounted for in HPSG. The paper shows that the transparency effect of TRFs can be handled by feature inheritance from the nucleus predicate phrase, together with a constructional constraint that deals with the exocentric property of TFRs.
Dualist Syntax
(2008)
A dualist syntax has two components: (1) the lexicon, a structured set of formatives ('words'); and (2) rules for combining those formatives into utterances. This paper defends syntactic dualism against three 'monist' challenges. First, evidence for lexical argument structure can be found in deverbal nominalization, which preserves that structure systematically. Second, words represent the smallest units for idiom formation and contextual polysemy effects, which is expected on the dualist view but not if word meanings are composed in the syntax. Third, the count/mass properties of nouns suggest an interleaving of conceptual and grammatical information in semantic composition.
Predicate complements
(2008)
This paper proposes a representation for syllable structure in HPSG, building on previous work by Bird and Klein (1994), Höhle (1999), and Crysmann (2002). Instead of mapping segments into a a separate part of the sign where syllables are represented structurally, information about syllabification is encoded directly in the list of segments, the core of the PHONOLOGY value. Higher level prosodic phenomena can operate on a more abstract representation of the sequence of syllables derived from the syllabified segments list. The approach is illustrated with analyses of some word-boundary phenomena conditioned by syllable structure in French.
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.
We consider two alternatives for memory management in typed-feature-structure-based parsers by identifying structural properties of grammar signatures that may be of some predictive value in determining the consequences of those alternatives. We define these properties, summarize the results of a number of experiments on artificially constructed signatures with respect to the relative rank of their asymptotic cost at parse-time, and experimentally consider how they impact memory management.
The lexical information of verbal lexemes, such as verbs and adjectives, plays an important role in syntactic parsing, because the structure of a sentence mainly hinges on the type of verbal lexemes. The question we address in this research is how to acquire the argument structure (henceforth ARG-ST) of verbal lexemes in Korean. It is well known that manual build-up of type hierarchy usually cost too much time and resources, so an alternative method, namely automatic collection of relevant information is much more preferred. This paper proposes a procedure to automatically collect ARG-ST of Korean verbal lexemes from a Korean Treebank. Specifically, the system we develop in this paper first extracts lexical information of ARG-ST of verbal lexemes from a 0.8 million graphic word Korean Treebank in an unsupervised way, checks the hierarchical relationship among them, and builds up the type hierarchy automatically. The result is written in an HPSG-style annotation, thus making it possible to readily implement the result in an HPSG-based parser for Korean. Finally, the result is evaluated with reference to two Korean dictionaries and also with respect to a manually constructed type hierarchy.
We present an analysis of adjuncts which, while based on the traditional binary adjunction schema, accommodates the phenomena that motivate the alternative Adjunct-as-Complement approach, such as adjunct extraction and case marking. The key idea is to enable the syntactic head (modifiee) to select for its modifier (adjunct) via the new valence feature dedicated for adjuncts, while leaving its values underspecified. Thus the selectional property of the modifiee percolates as well as that of the modifier, dispensing with the need to endow adjuncts a complement-like status.
My objective in this paper is to integrate scalar exclamatives into an HPSG grammar of French. First, a procedure to sort out scalar exclamatives from declaratives and interrogatives is proposed. Then, the main semantic and dialogical properties of exclamatives are presented: veridicity, ego-evidentiality, illocutionary double life and scalarity. Finally, assuming Ginzburg & Sag 2000, the exclamative clause type is defined.
This paper focuses on a specific type of verbless utterance, labeled PVU, which is defined by two properties:
• PVUs are not discourse fragments.
• PVUs can host a phrase in their right periphery which is coreferential with their external argument. This phrase is labeled α-phrase.
PVUs are analyzed as clausal predicative phrases. Although PVUs can have various illocutionary forces, their content type is constrained by their syntactic form. As for α-phrases, they are shown to be right-dislocated phrases. Right-dislocation is analyzed as a local anaphoric phenomenon. This ap proach is consistent with the anaphoric properties of PVUs’ external arguments.
Whether the Coordinate Structure Constraint (CSC) (Ross, 1967) is a syntactic constraint has been discussed much in the literature. This paper reconsiders this issue by drawing on evidence from Japanese and Korean. Our examination of the CSC patterns in relative clauses in the two languages reveals that a pragmatically-based approach along the lines of Kehler (2002) predicts the relevant empirical patterns straightforwardly whereas alternative syntactic approaches run into many problems. We take these results to provide strong support for the view that the CSC is a pragmatic principle rather than a syntactic constraint.
This paper deals with Korean postpositions. They are treated as suffixes in recent lexicalist works. But they differ syntactically from suffixes and we will propose to treat them as clitics, i.e. words combining with a phrase in the syntax and attaching to its last lexical item in the phonology. We treat them as weak syntactic heads, taking into account their head properties and the syntactic similarity between the mother phrase and the host phrase. They take the latter as complement and share most of its syntactic properties. Revising the traditional classification, we divide postpositions into three subtypes: marking, oblique and semantic postpositions, based on their distributional properties, such as optionality, non-nominal marking and stacking, etc. Finally we show how our analysis can be described in the HPSG model.
Preposition-noun combinations (PNCs) are compositional and productive, but not fully regular. In school grammars and many theoretical approaches, PNCs are neglected, but they have recently been addressed in an HPSG analysis by Baldwin et al. (2006). After discussing some basic properties of PNCs, we show that statistical methods can be employed to prove that PNCs are indeed productive and compositional, which again implies that PNCs should receive a syntactic analysis. Such an analysis, however, is impeded by the limited regularity of the construction. We will point out why adding semantic conditions to syntactic schemata might be necessary but not sufficient and turn then to a framework which allows the derivation of syntactic (and semantic) generalizations from linguistic data without taking recourse to introspective judgments.
Coordination in Japanese poses various puzzles which defy the standard notion of syntactic category. On the one hand, one can conjoin structures which one usually would not expect to form any constituent, and on the other hand, there are various conjunction particles that are sensitive to the kind of conjuncts that they combine with. In this paper we argue against abandoning the usual notion of constituency, and redefining the entire grammar of Japanese. We provide a novel construction-based account of the data in which the phenomena result from the interaction of the coordination construction, ellipsis, and allomorphy of the conjunction particle.
Verbs are the centerpiece of the sentence, and understanding of verb meanings is essential for language acquisition. Yet verb learning is said to be more challenging than noun learning for young children for several reasons. First, while nouns tend to denote concrete objects, which are perceptually stable over time, verbs tend to refer to action events, which are temporally ephemeral, and the beginning and the end of the action referred to by the verb are not clearly specified. Second, a verb takes nouns as arguments, and the meaning of a verb is determined as the relation between the arguments. To infer the meaning of a verb, children need to attend to the relation between the objects in the event rather than the objects themselves. In so doing, children make use of a variety of cues such as argument structure, meta-knowledge of the lexicon, and extra-linguistic contextual cues. In this paper, I present two lines of my recent research concerning young children's novel verb learning. Specifically, I first report a cross-linguistic study (Imai et al., 2008) examining how Japanese-, English-, and Chinese-speaking children utilize structural and non-structural, extra-linguistic cues when inferring novel verb meanings. Second, I present another study examining how young children utilize sound-meaning correlates (sound symbolism) in their inference of novel verb meanings. In the end, I evaluate the relative importance of structural cues among different cues children use in verb learning.
This paper presents a constraint-based account of verb form alternations (Short and Long Forms) in Mauritian which, basically, is syntactically driven: Short Forms appear with Canonical complements while Long Forms are expected with no realized complements. However, in specific contexts, Long Forms are unexpectedly authorized in declaratives with canonical complements and expresses Verum Focus.
Transparent heads
(2008)
Head-complement structures in HPSG identify most properties of the phrase with those of the head daughter, except for that valence property (e.g. SUBCAT or COMPS) whose constraints are met by the non-head daughter(s) in the phrase. In this paper I present several phenomena in English syntax where idiosyncratic properties of a non-head daughter in a phrase must remain visible on the phrasal node, in order to preserve the strong version of the principle of locality in subcategorization. I propose a general formal mechanism to effect this occasional transparency of heads with respect to certain properties of their complements.
This paper describes a number of verbal argument marking patterns found in the world's languages and provides HPSG analyses for them. In addition to commonly-occurring variations of morphosyntactic alignment (e.g. nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive), this paper also presents analyses of more complex phenomena, including ergativity splits, Austronesian-style focus-case systems, and direct-inverse systems and their interaction with case.
Direct quotation raises three major problems for grammatical modelling: (i) the variety of quoted material (which can be a non linguistic behavior, or a sign in a different language), (ii) the embedding of an utterance inside another one, (iii) a special denotation, the content of the quotation being the utterance itself. We propose a unary rule, which turns the quoted material into a linguistic sign whose content is itself a behavior, which entertains a resemblance relation to the behavior demonstrated by the speaker. Syntactically, direct quotation comes in two varieties: it can be the complement of a quotative verb, or constitutes a head sentence, modified by an adjunct containing a quotative verb whose complement is extracted and identified with its local features.
In this paper we address the question of which transitive verbs allow there-insertion in Danish. We propose that two constraints have to be met in order for verbs to appear in Danish there-constructions. Firstly, as have been noted by others, an empty direct object position must be available. This constraint is not sufficient for restricting the set of verbs in there-constructions. We further propose a locative constraint. The transitive verbs allowing there-insertion will be shown to coincide with verbs that allow a locative analysis.
The information-structural status of clitic left dislocated arguments in Spanish has been argued to depend crucially on their thematic role. Earlier HPSG analyses of related phenomena in other languages do not take into account this sort of information. A formalization will be presented which can handle differences in information-structure arising from different thematic roles of clitic left dislocated phrases.
This paper examines the syntactic behaviour of two omnisyndetic coordinations (also called correlative coordinations), i.e. the disjunctive and the conjunctive types in Romanian, by explaining its data in a Romance perspective. Major issue has been whether these structures have symmetric or asymmetric structures. If all these Romance languages share a symmetric analysis for the disjunctive type Conj ... Conj, it is not the case for the conjunctive type. Our aim is to show that the postulation of a conjunctional status for the Romanian structure şi ... şi ('both ... and'), which is the most widespread view in Romanian grammars, is inadequate for the Romanian data.
The word order facts of radically non-configurational languages pose a challenge to HPSG approaches which assume both that the surface order of words is the yield of the (tectogrammatical) tree and standard HPSG-style cancellation of valence lists. These languages allow discontinuous noun phrases, in which modifiers appear separated from their head nouns by arbitrarily many other words from the same clause. In this paper, I explore an analysis which preserves tectogrammatical-phenogrammatical equivalence, and accounts for the word order facts of Wambaya with an analysis based on non-cancellation. This analysis is contrasted with other approaches to discontinuous constituents and analyses of other phenomena based on non-cancellation. Finally, I explore the implications for current models of semantic compositionality.
Non-restrictive relative clauses (NRRCs) can modify constituents which undergo 'pragmatic enrichment' when they appear in answers to questions. For example, in an interchange like: 'A: What did Jo think? B: That you should say nothing, which is surprising.' What B says is surprising is that 'Jo thinks ...' On the face of it, this might seem problematic for approaches to NRRCs which assume 'syntactic integration' and to support an 'orphan' analysis, where NRRCs are combined with purely conceptual representations. In this paper we examine a range of elliptical and anaphoric phenomena, and show that this conclusion is misplaced. In fact, the phenomena argue strongly in favour of a syntactically integrated analysis.
We contrast two types of sentences with a preposed NP in French in a construction based HPSG grammar. They differ with respect to different grammatical aspects (syntax, semantics, pragmatics and phonology), which cluster uniquely into constructions. Both are colloquial, a reason why they have been recognized only recently (see Zribi-Hertz 1986, 1996, Sabio 1995, 2006). Accordingly, we rely for the data on spoken corpora (Corpaix, CFRP) as well as on our intuitions. Both constructions involve a partitioned semantics but this mode of composition is associated with different effects. One construction is characterized semantically: the preposed NP is the theme of a categorical proposition. The other construction is characterized pragmatically: it is associated with an independent declarative clause, a typical use of which is to signal a break in the interaction.
The result of questionnaire studies are presented which shows (i) that conjuncts are scope islands in Japanese and (ii) that left-node raising can nullify such scope islands. This finding confirms the theory advanced in Yatabe (2001), in which semantic composition is almost entirely carried out within order domains, and arguably contradicts the theory proposed in Beavers and Sag (2004), which introduces a mechanism called Optional Quantifier Merger to deal with the fact that right-node raising and left-node raising can have semantic effects.
Based on Krifka (1992) and de Kuthy (2000), this paper develops an architecture for complex topic-comment structures in HPSG and applies it to predicate fronting in English with the goal of capturing the insights of Ward (1988) on this construction. We argue that predicate fronting is a distributed constructional form consisting of an auxiliary occurring in a predicate preposing phrase. The use of predicate preposing is a function of a combination of simultaneous constraints on its theme structure, its background-focus distribution, and its presuppositional structure. It is shown that these constraints can be made explicit within the HPSG architecture developed here.
This paper aims at making a general description of Chinese NPs using Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The paper introduces the basic and complex structures of Chinese NPs and then shed light on the noun-classifier matching problem when implemented in HPSG. To solve this problem, the paper tries to establish a basic grammar of Chinese NPs in the framework of HPSG, which is implemented in the LKB system. The implementation shows, although the matching problem between noun and classifier can be described in HPSG, especially by the MRS, it is still difficult to efficiently represent the semantic constrains in the LKB system.