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Institute
The Big Mess Construction
(2007)
There is a construction in English, exemplified by 'how long a bridge', which is so irregular that it has been named the Big Mess Construction (Berman 1974). This paper first sketches its main characteristics and a treatment of the internal structure of the noun phrase which serves as a background for the analysis. It then presents three ways in which the Big Mess Construction can be analysed; two of them are lexicalist and are shown to be implausible; the third is constructivist and is argued to be superior. In a next step, the discussion is extended to two other types of constructions. The first concerns the English adnominal reflexives, as in 'the children themselves', and is shown to require a constructivist analysis which is similar but not identical to the one for the Big Mess Construction. The second concerns the combination of 'such' and 'what' with the indefinite article, as in 'such a pleasure'. In spite of its obvious resemblance with the Big Mess Construction this combination does not require a constructivist analysis; instead, it fits the lexicalist mould of most of the rest of HPSG.
An empirical overview of the properties of English prepositional passives is presented, followed by a discussion of formal approaches to the analysis of the various types of prepositional passives in HPSG. While a lexical treatment is available, the significant number of technical and conceptual difficulties encountered point to an alternative approach relying on constructional constraints. The constructional approach is argued to be the best option for prepositional passives involving adjunct PPs, and this analysis can be extended to create a hierarchy of constructions accommodating all types of prepositional passives in English, and the ordinary NP passive.
This paper aims to provide type hierarchies for Korean passive constructions on the basis of their forms within the HPSG framework. The type hierarchies proposed in this paper are based on the classification of Korean passives; suffixal passives, auxiliary passives, inherent passives, and passive light verb constructions. Verbs are divided into five subtypes in accordance with the possibility of passivization. We also provide type hierarchies for verbal nouns and passive light verbs.
In Sorani Kurdish dialects, the complement of a preposition can generally be realized either as a syntactic item (NP, independent pronoun or PP) or a bound personal morpheme (clitic/affix). However, the affixal realization of the complement gives rise to a range of specific phenomena. First, some prepositions display two different phonological forms depending on the realization of their complement: the variant combining with a syntactic item is referred to as ˋsimple', while the variant combining with an affixal complement is called ˋabsolute'. Furthermore, unlike syntactic complements, which are always realized locally, the affixal complement of an absolute preposition can have a non-local realization, attaching to a host with which it has no morphosyntactic relations. In order to deal with these facts, this paper proposes a classification of Sorani prepositions along two lines: the affixal versus non-affixal realization of the complement on the one hand and its local versus non-local realization on the other hand. All cases of non-local realization receive a lexical account, either in terms of argument composition or in terms of linearization constraints on domain objects.
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.
Remarks on locality
(2007)
This paper proposes a modification of HPSG theory—Sign-Based Construction Grammar—that incorporates a strong theory of both selectional and constructional locality. A number of empirical phenomena that give the appearance of requiring nonlocal constraints are given a principled, localist analysis consistent with this general approach, which incorporates certain insights from work in the tradition of Berkeley Construction Grammar, as exemplified by Fillmore et al. (1988), Kay and Fillmore (1999), and related work.
Abeillé and Godard (2007) describe a variety of Spanish whose complex predicates differ structurally from the more familiar flat VP type of complex predicate common to other varieties of Spanish and Romance. I present a verb cluster analysis of this variety which both captures these structural differences, and at the same time preserves those features that are common across both construction types. Coupled with a simple morphological treatment of affixation, this analysis predicts the range of 'clitic climbing' facts. The parsimony of the affixation analysis is afforded by an alternative approach to the constraints on reflexive affix distribution in Spanish complex predicates. I depart radically from previous morpho-lexical approaches to the phenomenon, instead showing how the constraints follow from independently motivated binding principles. This approach not only handles more of the Spanish data, but also has the potential to provide a unified account of the phenomenon across Romance.
This paper is a follow up on Müller, 2006. It contains some comments on suggestions about the interaction of phrasal Constructions with constituent order that Adele Goldberg made at various occasions. In addition the paper discusses various HPSG analyses of particle verbs that assume lexical representations including phonologically specified parts of particle verb lexical entries. A recent phrasal analysis of resultatives (Haugereid, 2007) is discussed as well and it is pointed out that control constructions pose problems for phrasal analyses that do not assume empty elements but require that the subject is realized in a phrasal configuration.
Modern Hebrew is considered to be a 'partial pro-drop language'. Traditionally, the distinction between cases where pro-drop is licensed and those in which it is prohibited, was based on the person and tense features of the verb: 1st and 2nd person pronominal subjects may be omitted in past and future tense. This generalization, however, was found to be false in a number of papers, each discussing a subset of the data. Thus, contrary to conventional wisdom, dropped 3rd person pronouns subjects do occur in the language in particular contexts.
Identifying these contexts by way of a corpus-based survey is the initial step taken in this study. Subsequently, a careful syntactic analysis of the data reveals broad generalizations which have not been made to date. Thus, what was initially assumed to be a uniform phenomenon of 3rd person pro-drop turns out to be manifested in three distinct types of constructions. Finally, the proposed HPSG-based analysis incorporates insights concerning locality, correlations between finite and non-finite control, non-canonical elements, and binding.
The so-called floating quantifier constructions in languages like Korean display intriguing properties whose successful processing can prove the robustness of a parsing system. This paper shows that a constraint-based analysis, in particular couched upon the framework of HPSG, can offer us an efficient way of analyzing these constructions together with proper semantic representations. It also shows how the analysis has been successfully implemented in the LKB (Linguistic Knowledge Building) system.
Multiple nominative constructions (MNCs) in Korean have two main sub- types: possessive and adjunct types. This paper shows that a grammar allow- ing the interaction of declarative constraints on types of signs - in particular, having constructions (phrases and clauses) - can provide a robust and efficient way of encoding generalizations for two different MNCs. The feasibility of the grammar developed here has been checked with its implementation into the LKB (Linguistic Knowledge Building) system
The paper examines two verb sequencing constructions in Ga: the Serial Verb Construction (SVC) and the Extended Verb Complex (EVC). The former is an instance of a commonly recognized construction, the latter is typically found in the Volta Basin area of West Africa. EVCs are sequences of verbs functioning as single verb units relative to the syntax, but with an internal structure much like syntactic complementation. Both constructions show agreement of aspect and mood marking throughout the sequence, but with differences in exponence: in an SVC all Vs expose such marking, in an EVC only a limited (down to one) number of verbs, depending on the inflectional category. The paper presents the basic facts, based on works by Dakubu (2002, 2004, to appear), and gives an HPSG account of their morphology, syntax and semantics. The analysis is sustained by a grammar of the phenomena implemented with the 'Linguistic Knowledge Builder' (LKB), an engineering platform for natural language processing.
Licenser rules have originally been introduced in Müller (1999) as a part of a grammar based on discontinuous constituents. We propose licenser rules as a means to avoid underspecified empty elements in grammars with continuous constituents. We applied them to a verb movement analysis of the German main clause with right sentence bracket and to complement extraposition. To reduce the number of unnecessary hypotheses, we extended the licenser rule concept with a licenser binding technique. We compared the licenser rule approach to an approach based on underspecified traces with respect to processing performance. In our experiment, the use of licenser rules reduced the parse time by a factor of 13.5.
This paper examines the syntactic behavior of the Mauritian copula in predicative and extracted sentences. As it is the case in many languages, the Mauritian copula ete is absent in certain constructions: It only appears in extraction contexts. Our aim is to show that the postulation of a null copula, which has been proposed in various analyses, is inadequate for the Mauritian data. The phenomenon, as it is argued, rather lends itself to a strictly construction-based analysis within the framework of HPSG and is based on the distribution of weak pronouns and TAM markers.
In this paper I suggest an interface level of semantic representations, that on the one hand corresponds to morpho-syntactic entities such as phrase structure rules, function words and inflections, and that on the other hand can be mapped to lexical semantic representations that one ultimately needs in order to give good predictions about argument frames of lexical items. This interface level consists of basic constructions that can be decomposed into five sub-constructions (arg1-role, arg2-role ... arg5-role). I argue in favour of phrasal constructions in order to account for altering argument frames and maybe also coercion without having to use lexical rules or multiple lexical entries.
Townsend and Bever (2001) and Ferreira (2003) argue that simple templates representing the most commonly used orderings of arguments within a clause (e.g., NP-V-NP = Agent-Action-Patient) are used early in sentence comprehension to derive a preliminary interpretation before a full parse is completed. Sentences which match these templates (e.g., active sentences, subject clefts) are understood quickly and accurately, while sentences which deviate from the templates (e.g. passive sentences, object clefts) require additional processing to arrive at the correct interpretation. The present study extends the idea of canonical templates to the domain of noun phrases. I report on two experiments showing that possessive free relative clauses in English, which involve a non-canonical ordering of the head noun, are more difficult to understand than canonically headed noun phrases. I propose two reasons for this finding: (1) possessive free relatives deviate from the canonical template for interpreting noun phrases; and (2) the formal cues for interpreting possessive free relatives are relatively subtle. More generally I suggest that canonical templates help constrain mismatch in language by making certain kinds of mismatches costly for language users. Finally, I argue that evidence for canonical templates fits best within a parallel-architecture, constructionist theory of grammar.
In this paper, we report on an experiment showing how the introduction of prosodic information from detailed syntactic structures into synthetic speech leads to better disambiguation of structurally ambiguous sentences. Using modifier attachment (MA) ambiguities and subject/object fronting (OF) in German as test cases, we show that prosody which is automatically generated from deep syntactic information provided by an HPSG generator can lead to considerable disambiguation effects, and can even override a strong semantics-driven bias. The architecture used in the experiment, consisting of the LKB generator running a large-scale grammar for German, a syntax-prosody interface module, and the speech synthesis system MARY is shown to be a valuable platform for testing hypotheses in intonation studies.
This paper provides a background on the role of world knowledge in disambiguating modals and proposes treating the disambiguation of counterfactuals as a slightly more tractable sub-case of the general problem. Using a model theoretic possible worlds approach, counterfactuals are disambiguated with respect to a world of evaluation resembling classic Formal Semantic treatments (e.g., Kratzer 1977, 1981, 1989; Lewis 1973; Veltman 2005). The world, which provides a context of evaluation, is located through the interaction of the antecedent and consequent propositions with world knowledge axioms. This approach to modal disambiguation provides a connection between a grammar and the type of inferences typically handled in Knowledge Representation Systems (e.g., Hobbs et al. 1990) in a limited domain. The model theoretic semantics are linked with typed feature structures in an HPSG syntax (Pollard and Sag 1994). This grammar is implemented in TRALE, Penn's (2004) Prolog-based framework for typed feature structure grammar development. The compositional semantics in TRALE is specified in Penn and Richters' (2004, 2005) Constraint Language for Lexical Resource Semantics (CLLRS). This semantic component provides a semantic parse in which heads and arguments are combined systematically and the scope of negation or quantification can be accurately reflected. In the case of counterfactuals, the CLLRS semantic parse is passed to a model-theoretic interpreter. The mapping between the CLLRS semantic parse and the well-formed formulas of the model is defined by checking the parseability of the formula in the compositional semantics. Sets of possible worlds interact with constraints on world knowledge and constraints defining counterfactual validity. The truth value for a counterfactual is returned to the grammar relative to a context of evaluation. The results of counterfactual evaluation are returned in a form consistent with the grammar's internal compositional semantics. By the method described above, the interpreter provides a grammar-external component in which inferences involving world knowledge have the potential to be more efficiently evaluated. Through the development of model-checking techniques, for instance, it could be shown whether or not well-formed formulas and constraints hold in larger models and move towards capturing more fine-grained modal inferences in a larger domain.
This paper discusses a non-constituent coordination construction that occurs in Russian in which constituents with different syntactic functions and different thematic roles are conjoined. These conjuncts are co-arguments of the same head and are subject to a number of idiosyncrasies.
We consider several alternative analysis of the phenomena, and conclude that these are unable to account for the full range of the facts. Thus, even though these conjuncts do not form a semantic unit, there is evidence that they do form a kind of coordination structure. The phenomena are challenging for any theory of grammar, but the syntax-semantics account that we provide involves minimal changes to standard HPSG architecture.
Three distinctions seem relevant for the scope properties of adverbs: their function (adjuncts or complements), their prosody (incidental or integrated) and their lexical semantics (parenthetical or non parenthetical). We propose an analysis in which the scope of French adverbs is aligned with their syntactic properties, relying on a view of adjuncts as loci for quantification, a linearization approach to the word order, and an explicit modelling of dialogue.
Pseudocoordination in Danish
(2007)
In this paper we propose an analysis of Danish pseudocoordination constructions. The analysis is based on a hybrid phrase hierarchy where phrase types are assumed to be subtypes of types that cut across the traditional division of phrasal types, allowing the phrase type of pseudocoordinations to be a subtype of both coordinate phrases and headed phrases, and consequently inherit properties from both types. The analysis is linearization-based. We further develop a set of constraints on the phrasal types in the hierarchy.
The hybrid phrase hierarchy and the set of constraints on the various types in the hierarchy explain why, on the one hand, pseudocoordinations contain conjunctions and the conjuncts must have the same form and tense, and on the other, have a fixed order, allow extraction out of the second conjunct, do not allow overt subjects in the second conjunct and allow transitive verbs to appear in there-constructions.
This paper proposes a projectionist account of the unexpressed object alternations in HPSG. The approach is based on the two-level mapping mechanism, developed in Manning and Sag (1998) and Sag et al (2003). The proposed analysis keeps identical argument structure values in the lexeme description of both valence alternatives, while different surface valence values are related by a lexical rule.
The HPSG model is applied cross-linguistically to English and Bulgarian. Some Bulgarian-specific traits, such as the limited alternation range and the grammaticalized aspect, related to the formal characteristics of the unexpressed object alternations, are discussed and interpreted within HPSG.
The treatment of French causatives and pronominal affixes outlined in Miller and Sag (1997) and Abeillé et al. (1998) is notable for its comprehensive coverage and analytic detail, but it relies on a number of ad hoc features and types that have little empirical justification. We sketch a new treatment of the same data set, which eliminates multiple lexical entries for the causative, as well as a number of other undesirable analytic devices. Our account builds on a long-standing observation that seeming irregularities in the system of case assignment to the causee of faire are not in fact exceptional, but determined by the general case assignment behavior of transitive verbs. This generalization, first incorporated into an HPSG analysis by Bratt (1990), was abandoned in subsequent HPSG work that sought to expand the coverage of French beyond that of Bratt's analysis. Our goal here is to show that broad coverage need not come at the expense of linguistically significant generalizations.
This paper presents an overview of a proposed linearisation grammar, which relies solely upon information residing in lexical heads to constrain word order. Word order information, which encompasses discontinuity as well as linear precedence conditions, is explicitly encoded as part of the feature structure of lexical heads, thus dispensing with a separate LP specification or 'phenogrammatical' layer standardly posited for linearisation. Instead, such lexicon-originated word order constraints are enforced in projections, propagated upwards and accumulated in the compound PHON feature, which represents phonological yields in an underspecified manner. Though limited somewhat in generative capacity, this approach covers the key phenomena that motivated linearisation grammars and offers a simpler alternative to the standard DOM-oriented theory.
In this contribution we will argue that negative polarity is a collocational phenomenon that does not follow from other properties of the respective lexical elements. With German data as evidence, we will follow a proposal by van der Wouden and treat Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) as collocates which must be licensed by abstract semantic properties of their contexts. Using a collocation module for HPSG, which has been independently motivated for bound words and idioms, we will show how to restrict the occurrence of NPIs to legitimate environments, starting from the negativity hierarchy of licensing environments by Zwarts. Besides a more fine-grained semantic licenser hierarchy, we will establish syntactic licensing domains and general collocational restrictions of NPIs.
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.
This paper attempts to decompose the Motion event into such elements as Figure, Path, Vector, and Ground based upon Talmy's framework, which makes it possible to formally analyze and compare the lexical semantics of the deictic motion verbs within and across languages. It is shown that the difference in interpretations of the Path is attributable to the lexical specifications of both deictic motion verbs and locative phrases. It is argued that deictic motion verbs can be lexically specified for the entailment of arrival only if they express the Path eventually directed to the deictic center. A formal analysis is given based upon the HPSG framework in order to identify the elements of a Motion event contributed by each element of a verb phrase, and to determine the compositional fashion in which they are combined to give the interpretation of the verb phrase as a whole.
The Japanese language is one of the languages where universal and existential quantification are expressed using wh-words with the conjunctive and disjunctive particles, respectively. In this paper, inspired by the syntactic and semantic parallelism found in Japanese between quantification, coordination, and question, we seek to analyze these constructions in a unified fashion. We investigate various phenomena of these constructions and show how these three constructions can be uniformly analyzed as cases where abstracted arguments are questioned or quantified for verbs. We then present an HPSG formalization of the analysis.
It has often been argued that Non-Constituent Coordinations involve ellipsis. Focussing in this paper on so-called 'Argument Cluster Coordination', we provide empirical evidence drawn from French against such elliptical analyses. We then sketch an alternative approach within HPSG, allowing non-standard constituents to be conjoined in the scope of some shared predicate. While such non-standard constituents are generally obtained by relaxing phrase structure, we propose analyzing them as non-headed constructions, deriving their unusual properties from the interplay of two different sets of constraints: those imposed by coordination and those imposed by predicates that select such clusters as arguments.
Situations in which conflicting constraints clash can potentially provide linguists with insights into the architecture of grammar. This paper deals with such a case. When predicative modifiers of morphologically rich languages head relative clauses, they are involved in two, sometimes conflicting, agreement relationships. Different languages adopt different strategies in order to resolve situations of conflicting constraints. This paper focuses on Standard Arabic and the hybrid agreement strategy which it employs. It argues that the HPSG theory of agreement, which distinguishes between morphosyntactic and semantic agreement, constitutes an appropriate framework for accounting for the phenomenon. In addition, it shows that contrary to claims made by Doron and Reintges (2005), a non-derivational framework such as HPSG is adequate for accounting for this non-trivial agreement pattern. Moreover, with a constructional approach, whereby constraints can target syntactic structures above the lexical level, better empirical coverage is achieved.
The purpose of this paper is to consider the proper treatment of short- and long-fronted adjuncts within HPSG. In the earlier HPSG analyses, a rigid link between linear order and constituent structure determines the linear position of such adjuncts in the sentence-initial position. This paper will argue that there is a body of data which suggests that adjunct fronting does not work as these approaches predict. I will then show that linearisation-based HPSG can provide a fairly straightforward account of the facts.
American Sign Language (ASL) has a group of verbs showing agreement with the subject or/and object argument. There has not been analysis on especially number agreement. This paper analyzes person and number agreement within the HPSG framework. I discuss person and number hierarchy in ASL. The argument of agreement verbs can be omitted as in languages like Italian. The constraints on the type agreement-verb have the information on argument optionality.
Russian shows the mixed agreement with the polite pronoun vy and pluralia tantum nouns, both of which have plural number in form but either singular or plural number in meaning. Two different forms of adjectives – short form and long form – agree in different number with those number mismatch nominals.
I adopted the idea of Siegel (1976) etc. that when a long-form adjective appears in the predicate position, there is always a null head that it modifies, with the HPSG's agreement theory of Wechsler & Zlatic (2003). I propose that all predicates – verbs, SF and LF adjectives – except predicate nominals show CONCORD agreement. LF adjectives show CONC agreement with the null anaphor 'one'. The different number values of LF adjectives results from index agreement between the null anaphor and the subject of the sentence.
We study the formal and pragmatic properties of the 'reinforced negation construction' in Italian, which, unlike the regular negative sentence, contains both non and an n-word in preverbal position. On the one hand, this construction relies on a more general construction (positive or negative), which is pragmatically associated with reprise assertion, on the other hand, it uses non without the usual constraints attached to it. We propose that this unfaithful recycling is a pattern for creating a form dedicated to metalinguistic negation. Our analysis integrates both negative types of negative forms with their formal and pragmatic properties.
Since Pollard and Sag (1994) it has been assumed that raising involves full structure sharing, whereas a control verb merely shares the content of one of the lower verb's arguments. This has been considered a property of the phenomena, despite the fact that Pollard and Sag (1994) present this syntactic difference as a hypothesis confirmed for Icelandic only. In this paper we discuss the difference between raising and control from the perspective of Dutch and German passives. It has already been shown by Van Noord and Kordoni (2005) that the secondary object passives in these languages are raising structures, in which the case of the raised argument changes. In this paper we provide additional evidence for the raising analysis, and we propose a new analysis, which allows for a uniform account of Dutch and German passives as raising structures. Przepiorkowski and Rosen (2004) show that control may exhibit case transmission; the data presented in this paper shows that raising may not. Therefore, we claim that the distinction between raising and control is found in theta-role assignment. Syntactically they tend to behave differently, but they may also behave in the exact same way.
Floating affixes in Polish
(2006)
The morphosyntactic status of Polish past tense agreement markers has been a matter of considerable debate in recent years (Spencer 1991, Borsley & Rivero 1994, Borsley 1999, Bański 2000, Kupść 2000, Kupść & Tseng 2005). Past tense agreement is expressed by a set of bound forms that either attach to the past participle, or else float off to a host further to the left. Despite this relative freedom of attachment, it is often noted in the literature, e.g., Borsley 1999, Kupść & Tseng 2005, that the combination of verbal host and agreement marker forms a word-like unit.
In this paper I will argue that these agreement markers are best analysed as affixes uniformly introduced on the verb whose inflectional features they realise. Building on the linearisation-based theory of morphology-syntax interaction proposed in Crysmann 2003, syntactic mobility of morphologically introduced material will be captured by mapping phonological contributions to multiple lexically introduced domain objects. It will be shown that this is sufficient to capture the relevant data, and connect the placement of floating affixes to the general treatment of Polish word order Kupść 2000.
Several analysis of Coordination of Unlikes have been proposed within the HPSG framework. In some of these approaches the possible combinations of 'unlike categories' are encoded in the grammar, while other accounts resort to an independently motivated ellipsis analysis. In this paper we provide further arguments in favor of the latter. However, some problematic cases of Coordination of Unlikes in certain S-adjoining constructions are left unaccounted for. We propose a general analysis of these S-adjoining constructions, and in doing so, the problematic coordination cases are predicted without the need for further assumptions.
The "flexibility" of gender in Tigrinya is uncovered by (i) setting a value for gender for each noun at the lexical level (i.e. bare controllers) and (ii) analysing gender shifts as signals for evaluations (i.e. evaluated controllers). The analysis is formalized as lexical rules which change the value of gend and add an elementary predication in the rels list.
In this paper, we present an analysis of noun phrases with elided nouns that dispenses with the positing of empty categories and preserves the NP structure assumed for NPs with overt nouns, modulo the absence of the head noun. On a par with existing traceless analyses of long distance dependencies, this is proposed as a further step towards a more lean theory of grammar, without phonetically null items.
Languages often require negation to be realized in a prominent position. A well known example is Italian, which seems to require a pre-verbal realization of negation. Some other languages require negation to be in a prominent position but do not require it to be pre-verbal. An example is Swedish. Working within Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), Sells (2000) proposes that Swedish requires a negative element which is not inside VP and that Italian has the same constraint. Similar facts are found in the VSO language Welsh. However, Sellss approach cannot be applied to Welsh. Borsley and Jones (2005) develop a selectional approach to Welsh, in which certain verbs require a negative complement. This works well for Welsh but cannot be applied to Swedish or Italian. A similar approach to all three languages is possible within the linearization-based version of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) developed by Kathol (2000). It seems, then, that a linear approach is preferable to both a structural and a selectional approach.
Metrical phonology in HPSG
(2006)
This paper proposes a new approach to the prosody-syntax interface in HPSG. Previous approaches to prosody in HPSG (Klein, 2000; Haji-Abdolhosseini, 2003) represent prosodic information by constructing metrical constituent structure in the tradition of (Selkirk, 1980; Liberman and Prince, 1977). One drawback of this approach is that it does not allow for a direct representation of purely metrical constraints, which are relegated to an unformalized performance component. By contrast, so called 'grid only' approaches (Prince, 1983; Selkirk, 1984; Delais-Roussarie, 2000) use a single data structure, a metrical grid, to encode prosodic constraints resulting from syntax and constraints of a rhythmic nature.
We first review relevant data from French showing that prosodic constituency is much less constrained by syntactic structure than is predicted by existing approaches. In all but very short utterances, many different prosodic groupings are possible for a given sentence with a determinate information structure, and rhythmic factors determine a preference ordering on the possible groupings. We then present an HPSG implementation of the metrical grid, and propose minimal syntactic constraints on relative prominence, leaving room for noncategorical rythmic constraints to choose between alternatives. We finish by discussing the interaction of the metrical grid with the rest of the prosodic grammar.
Conventional wisdom holds that productive morphology is regular morphology. Drawing evidence from French, we argue that the description of many lexeme formation processes is simplified if we hold that a productive rule may give rise to inflectionally irregular lexemes. We argue that the notion of a stem space allows for a straightforward description of this phenomenon: each lexeme comes equipped with a vector of possibly distinct stems, which serve as bases for inflectional form construction. The stem space is structured by default relations which encode the regular pattern of inflection; (partial) irregularities occur when a lexeme specifies a stem space violating the default relations. Derived irregularity is then the effect of a productive lexeme formation rule which specifies an irregular stem space for its output.
Abstract: A functional typology of copular be in Russian allows us to systematically relate variants of predication with and without copula. The analysis sketched in this article does not need empty categories; neither does it have to stipulate categories, category changes or constituents that are not morphologically signalled. With regard to HPSG formalization, the presented approach independently motivates the use of features and mechanisms that are already available in this framework.
Comparative correlative (CC) constructions have received much attention in recent years. Major issues have been whether they involve special constructions and whether they have symmetric or asymmetric structures. Evidence from Romance suggests that they require special constructions and that they may be either symmetric or asymmetric. French has a single construction which is asymmetric for some speakers and symmetric for others. Spanish has two distinct constructions, one asymmetric and the other symmetric with quite different properties. The facts can be accommodated in a straightforward way within construction-based HPSG.
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.
This paper focuses on passive constructions in Dutch. Specifically, we focus on worden, as well as krijgen passives in Dutch, for which we propose a uniform, raising analysis in HPSG. We also show that such an analysis can be carried over to account for passives cross-linguistically. Specifically, we look at corresponding structures in German and show that there is no need for a dual raising and control analysis for the German "agentive" (werden) and the German "dative" (kriegen) passives, respectively, as has been proposed in Müller (2002) and Müller (2003).
In Pollard & Sag (1994) and in Ginzburg & Sag (2000) phrases are either headed or non-headed, and if they are headed, there is a relation of selection between the daughters: either the head daughter selects its non-head sister(s), as in the phrases of type 'head-complements', or the non-head daughter selects its head sister, as in the phrases of type 'head-adjunct'. In the non-headed phrases, by contrast, there is no selection; in a coordinate structure, for instance, there is no relation of selection, neither between the conjuncts nor between the conjunction and the conjuncts. The central claim of this paper is that there are also phrases which are headed but in which neither daughter selects the other. To model such phrases I propose a new type, called 'head-independent'. Its properties are spelled out and its range of application is illustrated with various examples, including asymmetric coordination and apposition.
This paper provides a treatment of Polish Plural Comitative Constructions in the paradigm of HPSG in the tradition of Pollard and Sag (1994). Plural Comitative Constructions (PCCs) have previously been treated in terms of coordination, complementation and adjunction. The objective of this paper is to show that PCCs are neither instances of typical coordinate structures nor of typical complement or adjunct structures. It thus appears difficult to properly describe them by means of the standard principles of syntax and semantics. The analysis proposed in this paper accounts for the syntactic and semantic properties of PCCs in Polish by assuming an adjunction-based syntactic structure for PCCs, and by treating the indexical information provided by PCCs not as subject to any inheritance or composition, but as a result of applying a set of principles on number, gender and person resolution that also hold for ordinary coordinate structures.
Persian free relatives
(2005)
Free relatives (FRs) in Persian are Unbounded Dependency Constructions, containing gaps or resumptive pronouns (RPs). In some positions only gaps are allowed, and in some other positions only RPs. The structure of Persian FRs is bipartite, containing two constituents: a phrasal part and a sentential. Persian FRs are sensitive to the matching effect and show distinct properties from noun phrases, ordinary relative clauses, and interrogative complements. This paper proposes a unified HPSG account which assumes that the phrasal part of a FR is the head and the filler at the same time. The propped approach is presented in two versions (with and without traces) and can take care of the dependency between the gap or the RP and the licencing constituent with a truly single mechanism.
Algorithmic approaches to anaphor resolution are known to benefit substantially from syntactic disjoint reference filters. Typically, however, there is a considerable gap between the scope of the formal model of grammar employed for deriving referential evidence and its implementation. While accounting for many subtleties of language, such formal models at most partially address the algorithmic aspects of referential processing. This paper investigates the issue of implementing syntactic disjoint reference for robust anaphor resolution. An algorithmic account of binding condition verification will be developed that, on one hand, captures the theoretical subtleties, and, on the other hand, exhibits computational efficiency and fulfils the robustness requirements. Taking as input the potentially fragmentary parses of a robust state-of-the-art parser, the practical performance of this algorithm will be evaluated with respect to the task of anaphor resolution and shown to be nearly optimal.
We present a method for automatic RMRS semantics construction from dependency structures, following the semantic algebra of Copestake et al. (2001). We have applied this method to a subset of the TIGER Dependency Bank for German (Forst et al., 2004) to obtain a semantic treebank for (HPSG) parser evaluation. We describe the semantics construction mechanism and give evaluation figures from manual validation of the treebank. These indicate high precision of the automatic RMRS construction process.
This contribution is concerned with integrating the phenomenon of selectional restrictions in HPSG. Firstly, the question of treating selectional restrictions purely in the semantic module is tackled, as there are some contextual (or pragmatic) influences, which can repair the ill-formedness of violated selectional restrictions. Secondly, we present existing approaches to selectional restrictions within the framework and, lastly, make our own proposal which describes the subject as part of the semantics-pragmatics interface. In particular, we show how a semantic ontology can be integrated.
HPSG accounts of filler-gap dependencies hold considerable potential for explaining the cross-linguistic variation in unbounded dependency constructions (UDCs), specifically filler-gap dependencies. This potential comes from the SLASH specifications that are posited in all nodes along the extraction path (the path between filler and gap). However, as Hukari and Levine (1994, 1995, 1996) have observed, the HPSG analysis presented by Pollard and Sag (1994) fails to embody the generalizations required in order to explain key universal properties of UDCs, in particular the ˋregistration' of such dependencies in cases of subject- and adverb-extraction. This demonstration led Bouma et al. (2001) to propose a revised UDC analysis that avoids these difficulties by ˋthreading' the SLASH specfications through all heads within an extraction domain. However, Levine (2002) points out that this analysis encounters a new difficulty concerning the interaction of extraction and coordination. This paper revisits these issues, arguing that a small modification of the BMS analysis provides a solution to the important problem observed by Levine.
This paper investigates the binding of pronouns and reflexives in picture noun phrases, and focuses on data showing that reflexives and pronouns are not in complementary distribution in picture NPs with possessors. In particular, we discuss data showing that whereas reflexives can take either the possessor or the subject of the sentence as antecedent, pronouns are restricted to an antecedent other than the possessor phrase. We suggest that this asymmetry can be straightforwardly explained if we assume that (1) the possessor of a picture NP is not part of the head noun's argument structure and (2) Binding Theory is stated over dependents structure, the representation encompassing both a head's argument structure and other phrases dependent on it in various ways. If the possessor of a picture NP (PNP) is not part of the head's argument structure, it follows that reflexives in PNPs with possessors will be exempt from Binding Theory, which paves the way for an analysis of the reflexive data. Furthermore, we also show that if BT is regarded as defined over dependents structure, it follows that a pronoun in a picture NP with a possessor must be disjoint from that possessor phrase.
Remarks on binding theory
(2005)
We propose some reformulations of binding principle A that build on recent work by Pollard and Xue, and by Runner et al. We then turn to the thorny issue of the status of indices, in connection with the seemingly simpler Principle B. We conclude that the notion of index is fundamentally incoherent, and suggest some possible approaches to eliminating them as theoretical primitives. One possibility is to let logical variables take up the explanatory burden borne by indices, but this turns out to be fraught with difficulties. Another approach, which involves returning to the idea that referentially dependent expressions denote identity functions (as proposed, independently, by Pollard and Sag and by Jacobson) seerms to hold more promise.
It has been commonly assumed since Chomsky (1981) that the distribution of reflexive pronouns is subject to Binding Condition A. Reinhart and Reuland (1993) formulate Condition A in terms of the notion of syntactic predicate. The proposal I will develop in this paper is to factor out semantic and syntactic conditions on the occurrence of reflexive pronouns and to reduce them to independently motivated semantic and syntactic mechanisms. The semantic part is attributed to a theory of semantic composition recently developed by Chung and Ladusaw (2004), while the syntactic residue falls into the proper characterization of syntactic chains, as proposed by Reinhart and Reuland (1993) and Reuland (2001). To the extent that this approach is successful, Binding Condition A is rendered superfluous.
The process of turning a hand-written HPSG theory into a working computational grammar requires complex considerations. Two leading platforms are available for implementing HPSG grammars: The LKB and TRALE. These platforms are based on different approaches, distinct in their underlying logics and implementation details. This paper adopts the perspective of a computational linguist whose goal is to implement an HPSG theory. It focuses on ten different dimensions, relevant to HPSG grammar implementation, and examines, compares, and evaluates the different means which the two approaches provide for implementing them. The paper concludes that the approaches occupy opposite positions on two axes: faithfulness to the hand-written theory and computational accessibility. The choice between them depends largely on the grammar writer's preferences regarding those properties.
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.
In this paper, we claim that the filler-gap linkage in Korean UDCs needs to be handled at the level of syntax and that unbounded dependencies represented by traces, resumptive pronouns, and resumptive reflexives in Korean can be simply captured - without posing any extra mechanisms - in the traditional HPSG analysis of UDCs following Pollard and Sag (1994). It is because in HPSG traces are not all required to have the same feature, unlike in other movement-based approaches including the minimalist program and GB theory. In addition, we argue that the three kinds of Korean UDC elements appearing in gap positions do not form separate categories from their corresponding forms appearing in non-UDCs based on the same semantic and pragmatic properties such as logophoricity and contrastiveness. We also investigate some controversial issues of island constraints and strong crossover with respect to filler-gap linkage in Korean UDCs.
This paper presents an analysis of constructions involving the l-form of the verb in Polish, including primarily the past tense, the conditional mood, and the future tense. Previous approaches have attempted to treat these uniformly as auxiliary verb constructions. We argue against a unified treatment, however, in light of synchronic and diachronic evidence that indicates that only the future tense and the conditional still involve auxiliaries in modern Polish. We show that the past tense is now a simple tense, although the l-forms appear in combination with agreement affixes that can appear in different places in the sentence. We provide an account of the common linearization properties of the past tense markings and the conditional auxiliary. We present a detailed HPSG analysis of the past tense construction that relies on the introduction of two interacting agreement features. We then discuss the consequences of our proposals for the analysis of the conditional and future auxiliary constructions, and finally, we offer a treatment of constructions involving inflected complementizers in Polish.
We propose a formulation of 'relative tense theory' as applied to the complex tenses in Japanese using an HPSG grammar with its semantics represented based on Discourse Representation Theory. Specifically, a mechanism of tense interpretation which consecutively combines Discourse Representation Structures in parallel with an otherwise motivated hierarchical syntactic structure is presented. The framework provides a concise and comprehensive account of the Japanese simplex and complex tenses; it is made possible by the use of a hypothetical temporal point temporal axis, which relates the location time of the relevant clause to an outer temporal point, and a modal semantic operator woll.
This paper discusses how the English Resource Grammar (ERG) captures the optionality of certain complements of verbs based on a single lexical entry coupled with an ontology of markings distinguishing optional from obligatory as well as unrealized from realized elements. Subject-head and head-complement structures are modified accordingly, but due to the lack of a possibility to express and use relational goals in grammars implemented in the LKB system, the ERG encoding falls short of the goal of treating optional complements in a general way. Instead, it requires two new types of ˋauxiliary' phrases which are otherwise unmotivated. We show that the problem can be overcome by using a recursive relation selecting a member from a list. The use of a lean implementation platform not supporting such relational goals, such as the LKB, thus results in a loss of generality of the grammars that can be expressed, which undermines the closeness of the implemented grammar to current linguistic analyses as one of the hallmarks of HPSG-based grammar implementation. The case study presented in this paper thus supports the position argued in Götz and Meurers (1997) that a system for the implementation of HPSG-based grammars should include both universal implicational principles as well as definite clauses over feature terms.
In this paper, I first make an observation that there is a certain parallelism in the scope interpretation possibilities of adverbs and quantifiers with respect to different types complex predicates in Japanese, drawing on a comparison of the light verb construction and the causative construction. I will then argue that previous approaches to complex predicates in Japanese in the lexicalist tradition (Matsumoto 1996; Manning et al. 1999) fail to capture this generalization successfully. Finally, building on a novel approach to syntax/semantics interface in HPSG by Cipollone (2001), I develop an analysis of the semantic structure of complex predicates that accounts for the empirical observation straightforwardly.
We argue here for a lexicalist analysis of the Korean copula (following Kim, Sells and Wescoat (2004)), on the basis of different properties of sequences of noun-plus-copula, which shows word-like behavior, in contrast to noun and negative copula, which are independent syntactic units. The interactions of these items with various copy constructions brings out their clear differences. The analysis is formalized in HPSG using Lexical Sharing, from Wescoat (2002).
According to the Projection Principle (Chomsky 1981), expletives have no semantic content and thus cannot occur in theta-marked positions. However, there are many examples where expletive it appears as a direct object, in violation of the Projection Principle. The various attempts that have been made to account for such cases (e.g. the case-based analysis of Authier (1991), the predication analysis of Rothstein (1995), and the Specifier analysis of Stroik (1991, 1996)) all posit movement of the expletive from a non-theta marked position to direct object position. However, these analyses have so far been unsuccessful in capturing several important contrasts, e.g. variable optionality of the expletive it. This paper argues that such contrasts (and the complex behavior of expletive it more generally) follow straightforwardly from a lexicalist, constraint-based analysis in which lexical information and independently motivated constraints interact in subtle ways.
Focusing on the examples of multiple degree modification, this paper argues that the class of degree expressions in English is syntactically and semantically diverse, subdivided both according to the semantic effects of its members and according to the extent to which they permit, and participate in, multiple layers of modification. We argue that these two factors are linked, and result in (at least) a three-way distinction between ˋtrue degree morphemes', which map gradable adjectives to properties of individuals and combine with their arguments in a Head-Specifier structure; ˋintensifiers', which are syntactic and semantic modifiers of properties constructed out of gradable adjectives; and ˋscale modifiers', which are also syntactic and semantic modifiers, but which combine with ˋbare' gradable adjectives (relations between individuals and degrees) rather than properties formed out of gradable adjectives.
The present paper investigates a certain subset of clause linkage phenomena and develops a constraint-based account to the empirical fact that clauses need to be distinguished with respect to their degree of integratedness into a potential matrix clause. Considering as example German, it is shown that the generally assumed twofold distinction between main and subordinate clauses (or root and embedded clauses) does not suffice to deal with the presented data. It is argued that the discussed linkage phenomena originate from syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of the clauses involved, and should hence be encoded in grammar.
The paper reviews basic patterns of reflexive binding in Norwegian, and explores a possible implementation of them in an HPSG grammar using the LKB platform. Norwegian has two reflexive elements, with distinct constraints and corresponding 'anti-binding' effects; they can cooccur but also occur independently. As over-all strategy for resolving reflexive binding we use one resembling the 'slash' procedure for wh-dependencies. Binding constraints are imposed partly through lexical specification, partly through phrasal combination rules. Challenges are noted residing in the possibility for sentences to contain an unbounded number of reflexives.
We examine how a large-scale computational grammar can account for the complex nature of Japanese verbal compounds. Previous computational Japanese grammars have tried to avoid the problem by simple solutions such as enumerating as many verbal compounds in the lexicon as possible. In contrast, we develop the analysis that is linguistically adequate and computationally tractable and thus meets the requirement of a syntactically and semantically precise natural language processing of Japanese like Bond et al. (2005). Our analysis distinguishes between two kinds of verbal compounds: syntactic compounds, which are fully productive; and lexical compounds, which are of varying productivity.
We present a novel well-formedness condition for underspecified semantic representations which requires that every correct MRS representation must be a net. We argue that (almost) all correct MRS representations are indeed nets, and apply this condition to identify a set of eleven rules in the English Resource Grammar (ERG) with bugs in their semantics component. Thus we demonstrate that the net test is useful in grammar debugging.
On binding domains
(2005)
In this paper I want to explore reasons for replacing Binding Theory based on the anaphor-pronoun dichotomy by a Binding Theory allowing more domains restricting/defining anaphoric dependencies. This will, thus, have consequences for the partitioning of anaphoric elements, presupposing more types of 'anaphors'/'pronouns' than standard Binding Theory offers us.
The Grammar Matrix is a resource for linguists writing grammars of natural languages; however, up to this point it has not included support for coordination. In this paper, we survey the typological range of coordination phenomena in the world's languages, then detail the support, both syntactic and semantic, for those phenomena in the Grammar Matrix. Furthermore, we describe the concept of a Matrix module and our software that enables grammar writers to easily produce an extensible starter grammar.
Syncretism in German: A unified approach to underspecification, indeterminacy, and likeness of case
(2005)
In this paper I address the phenomenon of syncretism in German and show how Flickinger (2000)'s approach to related issues in English can be adapted to provide a compact, disjunction-free representation of German nominal paradigms by means of combined case/number/gender type hierarchies. In particular, I will discuss the issue of case identity constraints in German coordinate structures, which has so far prevented successful application of Flickinger's proposal to German, and show how likeness constraints targetting individual inflectional dimensions of a combined type hierarchy can be expressed by means of typed lists that abstract out the relevant dimension.
I further show that current type-based approaches to feature neutrality are unable to combine the treatment of this phenomenon with the virtues of underspecification. I will then propose a revised organisation of the inflectional type hierarchies suggested by Daniels (2001), drawing on a systematic distinction between inherent and external (case) requirements.
This paper proposes a distinct approach to local binding effects for reflexives and pronominals in English whereby the nature of local binding domains is a by-product of the incremental interpretation of syntactic derivations (Uriageraka 1999, Chomsky 2000, 2001), emphasizing the role of the Conceptual /Intentional interface and the computational system (i.e. bare output conditions) in shaping general principles of grammars. A significant development of the Minimalist framework is the proposal that derivations operate through phases or multiple spell outs, which allows to reduce the strict cyclicity of derivations, and related locality effects of movement, to interface (bare output) conditions and economy conditions. In this paper I propose that incremental interpretation can further capture local binding domains effects of conditions A and B of Chomsky's (1981, 1986) Binding Theory. Basically, local binding domains are shown to correspond to accessible phase domains. Our proposal hence contrasts with standard analyses (e.g. Reinhart and Reuland 1993, Pollard and Sag 1992) that define co-argumenthood as the core factor from which binding conditions are developed. Our proposal also provides a new perspective on the core contrasts between A-chain and A-bar chain w.r.t. binding and scope reconstruction effects and argues that checking of the uninterpretable feature Case is what defines potential phase domains.
In this paper we present a proposal to integrate pragmatic information, both from the preceding discourse and the extra-linguistic context, in the grammar. We provide an analysis of elliptical fragments according to how they are anchored to the context and the kind of resolution they require. We also present an alternative view about the syntax of fragments.
As has been shown in other Polynesian languages, in Tongan, adnominal elements can modify incorporated nouns in the noun incorporation construction. Two analysis are considered in this paper for understanding this construction within HPSG. The first, lexical sharing (Kim and Sells, this volume), views the verbs that include incorporated nouns as being single words corresponding to two syntactic atoms. However, this analysis makes incorrect predictions on the transitivity of incorporation clauses. A second analysis, extending Malouf (1999), views these words as verbs, but with some of the combinatorial properties of nouns. This offers both a better account of the data, and preserves the more restrictive theory of the morphology-syntax interface.
Georgian is a language allowing reflexives to be marked by ergative. The subject use of the Georgian reflexive phrase was first documented with causative verbs by Asatiani (1982). The later works such as (Amiridze and Everaert, 2000), (Amiridze, 2003), (Amiridze, 2004) discuss the use with object-experiencer verbs and transitive verbs on non-agentive reading. The present paper offers the first hand data on subject uses of the Georgian reflexive phrase with transitive verbs on their agentive reading in special contexts (such as a twin context, Madame Tussaud context, etc.) which are problematic for the Binding Theory of Chomsky (1981) as well as for the Reflexivity Theory of Reinhart and Reuland (1993). The data could be accounted for within the approach developed in (Reuland, 2001). However, the subject uses of the Georgian reciprocal ertmanet- leave the issue of subject anaphors open.
The principal aim of this paper is to present a comprehensive theory of coordination of unlikes, i.e., a theory that is capable of dealing with every phenomenon resulting from coordination of unlikes. The proposed theory accounts not just for standard cases of coordination of unlike arguments and coordination of unlike functors but also for cases involving single-conjunct agreement and what will be called each-conjunct agreement. In the course of the argumentation, it is also shown that, even in a language like English, predicate-argument agreement needs to be described in terms of a relational constraint that is not simply an identity requirement.
To model the pied piping in interrogative and exclamative clauses Ginzburg & Sag (2000) proposes a nonlocal head-driven treatment, thus emphasizing the resemblances with extraction. This treatment has a number of drawbacks: it relies on poorly motivated lexical rules and nonbranching phrase structure rules, it makes false predictions about pied piping in PPs, and it presupposes an implausible structure for NPs with predeterminers. To solve these problems I propose an alternative in which pied piping is treated as a local functor-driven dependency. Technically, the WH feature is integrated in the CATEGORY objects, and the propagation of its values is modeled by constraints which are independently needed for the treatment of other phenomena.
This paper focuses on aspects of the licensing of adverbial noun phrases (AdvNPs) in the HPSG grammar framework. In the first part, empirical issues will be discussed. A number of AdvNPs will be examined with respect to various linguistic phenomena in order to find out to what extent AdvNPs share syntactic and semantic properties with non-adverbial NPs.Based on empirical generalizations, a lexical constraint for licensing both AdvNPs and non-adverbial NPs will be provided. Further on, problems of structural licensing of phrases containing AdvNPs that arise within the standard HPSG framework of Pollard and Sag (1994) will be pointed out, and a possible solution will be proposed. The objective is to provide a constraint-based treatment of NPs which describes non-redundantly both their adverbial and non-adverbial usages. The analysis proposed in this paper applies lexical and phrasal implicational constraints and does not require any radical modifications or extensions of the standard HPSG geometry of Pollard and Sag (1994).
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 contribution we propose a new module for handling idioms and distributional idiosyncrasies. Based on the concept by Richter/Sailer (1999) the new feature COLL (context of lexical licensing) plays the central role in our approach. We provide a way to handle decomposable and nondecomposable idioms and idioms containing bound words. Our module guarantees the co-occurrence of all idiom parts and of bound word and licensing context, respectively. A prerequisite for our analysis is a means to select for particular elements in the lexicon. We introduce another feature, LISTEME, which gives each lexical item its unique identifier andmakes it possible to select for a particular lexical word or phrase. Finally, we compare our proposal with alternative approaches and give some ideas regarding further applications beyond idiomaticity.
A compound matrix
(2004)
This paper presents a suplement to the Grammar Matrix, namely what I call a Compound Matrix ; in reality, it is not a matrix, since the type file includes a fully specified cross-linguistic inventory of compound types. The idea is that the grammar writer can comment out the ungrammatical types for his or her own language. The theory behind the typology is presented here in a bottom-up fashion, from the basic assumptions to the actual linguistic types.
Japanese is often taken to be strictly head-final in its syntax. In our work on a broad-coverage, precision implemented HPSG for Japanese, we have found that while this is generally true, there are nonetheless a few minor exceptions to the broad trend. In this paper, we describe the grammar engineering project, present the exceptions we have found, and conclude that this kind of phenomenon motivates on the one hand the HPSG type hierarchical approach which allows for the statement of both broad generalizations and exceptions to those generalizations and on the other hand the usefulness of grammar engineering as a means of testing linguistic hypotheses.
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.
This paper summarizes the architecture of Lexical Resource Semantics (LRS). It demonstrates how to encode the language of two-sorted theory (Ty2; Gallin, 1975) in typed feature logic (TFL), and then presents a formal constraint language that can be used to extend conventional description logics for TFL to make direct reference to Ty2 terms. A reduction of this extension to Constraint Handling Rules (CHR; Fruehwirth & Abdennadher, 1997) for the purposes of implementation is also presented.
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.
During the past fifty years sign languages have been recognised as genuine languages with their own syntax and distinctive phonology. In the case of sign languages, phonetic description characterises the manual and non-manual aspects of signing. The latter relate to facial expression and upper torso position. In the case of manual components these characterise hand shape, orientation and position, and hand/arm movement in three dimensional space around the signer's body. These phonetic charcaterisations can be notated as HamNoSys descriptions of signs which has an executable interpretation to drive an avatar.
The HPSG sign language generation component of a text to sign language system prototype is described. The assimilation of SL morphological features to generate signs which respect positional agreement in signing space are emphasised.
In this study we show that constituency is of limited importance for a proper treatment of the interaction between the linear position of a wa-marked nominal in a Japanese sentence and possible domains of contrastive focus, and that constraints concerning contrastive focus should be represented in terms of linear order and not constituency. Linearisation HPSG, where linear order is independent from constituency, provides a good basis for an analysis. Some constraints are provided in terms of order domains, and it is shown that these constraints can deal with the phenomena in question, and that the cases problematic for the constituency-based analyses can also be accounted for by our analysis.
In this paper I present two classes of double object constructions in Modern Greek, i.e., the genitive, as well as the double accusative, ditransitive constructions. I show that these two classes differ from one another in that not both of them permit derivational processes such as the formation of adjectival passives. I also look at the case properties associated with the verbs which head Modern Greek genitive and double accusative ditransitive constructions. Finally, the analysis I propose for these constructions in Modern Greek are formalized using the Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS) framework of Copestake et al. (2001) and Copestake et al. (2003).
The Russian data presented in Perlmutter and Moore (2002) seem to call into question the standard analysis of raising within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG): In Russian, the case marking of the raising target and raising pivot does not seem to be shared. In this paper, we show that the phenomena described by Perlmutter and Moore can receive another analysis, fully compatible with HPSG's theory of raising. We argue in addition that our account leads to a slightly simpler model of the Russian data than Perlmutter and Moore's. Crucially, our analysis is only available if we avail ourselves of a rich network of language-specific constructional schemata, a stance recently advocated within HPSG, following the lead of Construction Grammar.
Linking in constructions
(2004)
In this paper I will make an attempt to show how the linking normally done in the lexicon also can be done in constructions. The motivation behind this is the flexibility it gives the grammar writer in underspecifying lexical entries. Being too rigid about linking in the lexicon may lead to unsatisfying results such as multiple lexical entries for what one intuitively feels is just one lexical entry, or alternatively, lexical rules which are not morphologically motivated. The aim is to show that this can be avoided by letting constructions introduce the linking information instead.
We present a constraint-based syntax-semantics interface for the construction of RMRS (Robust Minimal Recursion Semantics) representations from shallow grammars. The architecture is designed to allow modular interfaces to existing shallow grammars of various depth - ranging from chunk grammars to context-free stochastic grammars. We define modular semantics construction principles in a typed feature structure formalism that allow flexible adaptation to alternative grammars and different languages.
Recent analyses of mismatches at the syntax-semantics interface investigate e.g. modification of agentive nouns (Larson, 1998), modification of quantifying pronouns (Abney, 1987), or recursive modification (Kasper, to appear). Each of these analyses is tailored to a specific set of data, and it is not immediately obvious how they could be generalised to cover a larger set of data. I propose a unified analysis for these mismatches that attempts to bring out their common ground. This analysis shares some of its basic intuitions with the one of Kasper, but is more general because the mismatches are handled locally in the CONT feature. Its pivot is an elaborate syntax-semantics interface that is based on a surface-oriented syntactic analysis. This analysis generalises easily to the mismatches at the morphology-semantics interface for German separable-prefix verbs that were discussed in (Müller, 2003).
Negation and negative indefinites raise problems for the principle of compositionality of meaning, because we find both double and single negation readings in natural languages. De Swart and Sag (2002) solve the compositionality problem in a polyadic quantifier framework. The syntax-semantics interface exploits an extension of the Cooper storage mechanism that HPSG uses to account for scope ambiguities. In de Swart and Sag (2002), all negative quantifiers are collected into an N-store, and are interpreted by means of iteration (double negation) or resumption (negative concord) upon retrieval. This puts the ambiguity between single and double negation readings in the grammar, rather than in the lexical items. This paper extends the earlier analysis with a typology of negation and negative indefinites using bi-directional optimality theory (OT). The constraints defined are universal, but their ranking varies from one language to the next. In negative concord languages, the functional motivation for the marking of 'negative variables' wins out, so we use n-words. Double negation languages value first-order iteration, so we use plain indefinites or negative polarity items within the scope of negation. The bi-directional set-up is essential, for syntactic and semantic variation go hand in hand.
Linearization-based HPSG theories are widely used for analyzing languages with relatively free constituent order. This paper introduces the Generalized ID/LP (GIDLP) grammar format, which supports a direct encoding of such theories, and discusses key aspects of a parser that makes use of the dominance, precedence, and linearization domain information explicitly encoded in this grammar format. We show that GIDLP grammars avoid the explosion in the number of rules required under a traditional phrase structure analysis of free constituent order. As a result, GIDLP grammars supportmore modular and compact grammar encodings and require fewer edges in parsing.
In this paper, I shall discuss the semantic attachment of intersective modifiers in German coherent constructions. I shall show that a purely syntactic solution to the observable attachment ambiguity is undesirable for reasons of processing e ciency and/or massive spurious ambiguity. Instead, I shall follow Egg and Lebeth (1995) and propose an extension to Minimal Recursion Semantics, permitting the expression of underspecified semantic attachment. This rather trivial move, as we shall see, will not only be preferable for processing reasons, but it will also be more in line with the spirit of underspecified semantics, e ectively providing a compact representation of purely semantic distinctions, instead of unfolding these distinctions into a rain forest of tree representations and derivations. I will present an implementation of the underspecification approach integrated into the German HPSG developed at DFKI and compare its e ciency to an alternative implementation where semantic attachment is unfolded by means of retrieval rules.
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.