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Of all French functional elements, the form de has without question the widest variety of uses, and presents the greatest challenge for linguistic description and analysis. Historically a preposition, it still has a number of prepositional uses in modern French, but in many contexts it calls for an altogether different treatment. We begin by outlining a general distinction between oblique and non-oblique uses of de. We then develop a detailed account of constructions where de combines with an N'. We provide a unitary analysis of de in three constructions (quantifier extraction, "quantification at a distance", and negative contexts) which have been not been considered to be related in previous accounts.
Specificational pseudoclefts (SPCs) have been a great challenge for a syntactic theory, because, despite the surface division between the pre- and post-copular elements, the post-copular 'pivot' behaves as if it occupied the gap position in the precopular wh-clause. This paper argues that movement-based or deletion-based syntactic approaches and purely semantic approaches have problems in dealing with syntactic properties and connectivity problems of SPCs in English. Observing the parallelism between SPC pivots and short answers to questions, it proposes an HPSG account based on a non-deletion-based QDT (Question-in-disguise theory) approach and on the equative analysis of the specificational copular sentences. The paper shows that SPCs must be handled by an integrated account of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the construction, and argues that the connectivity problems should be approached from such an integrated view.
On the notion 'determiner'
(2003)
Following a common practice in generative grammar, HPSG treats the determiners as members of a separate functional part of speech (Det). The status of the functional parts of speech is a matter of debate and controversy. The auxiliaries, for instance, are commonly treated as members of a separate functional category (Aux or Infl) in many variants of generative grammar, including GB, MP and LFG, but in GPSG and HPSG, it is a matter of equally common practice to treat them as members of V and to reject the postulation of a separate functional category, see Pullum & Wilson (1977) and Gazdar, Pullum & Sag (1982). This text makes a similar case for the determiners; more specifically, it argues that the determiners are categorially heterogeneous, in the sense that some are members of A, whereas others are members of N. The argumentation is mainly based on inflectional morphology and morpho-syntactic agreement data. The consequences of the categorial heterogeneity are hard to reconcile with the specifier treatment of the determiners in Pollard & Sag (1994) and with the Det-as-head treatment in Netter (1994), but it can smoothly be integrated in the functor treatment of the prenominals in Allegranza (1998) and Van Eynde (2002).
We present an approach to the interpretation of non-sentential utterances like B's utterance in the following mini-dialogue:
A: "Who came to the party?"
B: "Peter."
Such utterances pose several puzzles: they convey 'sentence-type' messages (propositions, questions or request) while being of non-sentential form; and they are constrained both semantically and syntactically by the context. We address these puzzles in our approach which is compositional, since we provide a formal semantics for such fragments independent of their context, and constraint-based because resolution is based on collecting contextual constraints.
Wasow (1977) argues that linguistic theory should recognize two qualitatively distinct types of rules: syntactic rules, which can affect more "superficial" grammatical function properties; and lexical rules, which affect deeper lexical semantic properties of lexical items. However, lexicalist theories of grammar have replaced syntactic rules with lexical rules leaving Wasow's dichotomy potentially unexplained. Our goal in this paper is to recapture Wasow's insight within a lexicalist framework such as HPSG. Building on Sag & Wasow's (1999) distinction between lexeme and word, we claim that there is a contrast between lexical rules that relate lexemes to lexemes (L-to-L rules) and lexical rules that relate words to words (W-to-W rules) and that these differences follow from the architecture of the grammar. In particular, we argue that syntactic function features (ARGST, VALENCE, etc.) are not defined for lexemes, while lexical semantic features (CONTENT) are. From this it follows that L-to-L rules can affect lexical semantic features, and not syntactic function features. In addition, since words are defined for syntactic function features, W-to-W rules can change them. In this paper, we support this hypothesis by examining certain differences between two types of Noun Incorporation construction, and their relation to other rules in the grammar. We argue that Compounding Noun Incorporation is an L-to-L type and that Classifier Noun Incorporation is a W-to-W type; we base our argument on the interaction of Noun Incorporation and Applicative Formation in the Paleo-Siberian language Chukchi and the isolate language Ainu.
This paper examines reprise questions: questions which request clarification of the meaning intended by a speaker when uttering a word or phrase. As such they can act as semantic probes, providing information about what meaning can be associated with word and phrase types. We present corpus evidence regarding the meaning of nouns and noun phrases, and argue that this evidence runs contrary to the usual treatments of semantics in HPSG, and to the traditional generalised quantifier view of NPs as sets of sets. Instead we outline an analysis of NPs as (possibly functional) sets of individuals.
This paper seeks to improve HPSG engineering through the design of more terse, readable and intuitive type signatures. It argues against the exclusive use of IS-A networks and, with reference to the English Resource Grammar, demonstrates that a collection of higher-order datatypes are already acutely in demand in contemporary HPSG design. Some default specification conventions to assist in maximizing the utility of higher-order type constructors are also discussed.
This paper shows that the Gerund Phrase (GP) in the Spanish Gerund Construction (e.g., El jefe entró a su oficina corriendo, lit. The boss entered his office running ) is sometimes a complement (in SGCC) and sometimes an adjunct (in SGCA). Although in both cases, the GP expresses a non-argument of the main lexical verb's denotation, it is a syntactic adjunct in SGCA and a syntactic dependent of the main clause s head in SGCC. We argue that there is a semantic correlate of this syntactic difference and propose a general principle that constrains the semantic relations that can hold between the denotata of heads and added members of their ARG-ST lists: The two denotata must be part of a larger macro-event in the sense of Talmy (2000). We further show that the relation between the events denoted by the gerund and main verbs involves four semantic conditions and that which subset of those four conditions are satisfied in a particular SGCC sentence determines what subkind of SGCC is involved.
It is a much-debated issue whether one should assume separate lexical entries for participles used in passive and perfect constructions or whether there is just one lexical entry that is used in different ways depending on whether a passive or perfect auxiliary is present in the clause.
In previous work I criticized approaches trying to analyze the passive with one lexical entry for making empirically wrong predictions and suggested a lexical-rule based approach were two different lexical items for the participle are licensed.
In this paper I show how Heinz and Matiasek's (1994) formalizations of Haider's (1986) ideas can be extended and modified in a way that both modal infinitives and control constructions can be captured correctly. The suggested analysis needs only one lexical item for participles, base form infinitives, and zu infinitives irrespective of their usage in active or passive like structures.
In Japanese, as in other classifier languages like Chinese and Malay, numerals do not directly quantize nouns, but first combine with a classifier to form a measure phrase (MP; cf. Aikhenvald 2000). From the perspective of constraint-based approaches to syntax/semantics, the mutual selective restriction between classifiers and nouns can be stated in terms of information-sharing and featural identity, to some extent parallel to the treatment of gender/number agreement (between determiner and noun, for instance) (cf. Pollard and Sag 1994; Kathol 1999). There are, however, data that challenge this line of approach to noun-classifier matching. We demonstrate in this paper that it is possible that a single noun is associated with different types of classifier, and show why they are problematic for unification-based approaches, similar to the situation with case syncretism in European languages (Ingria 1990 and others). Later in the paper, we argue that information-sharing between noun, predicate and classifier is not completely transitive, and present a formal analysis which models multiple selectional requirements with sets.
This paper compares transformation-based and constraint-based treatments of unbounded filler-gap dependencies, the latter specifically as articulated in terms of HPSG, and argues, contrary to the commonly made allegations of notational variance , that there is purely empirical evidence that is consistent with only the constraint-based account. Recent proposals to deal with parasitic gaps in terms of null pronominals and empty operators are unable to account for the phenomenon of symbiotic gaps, the apparent case mismatches found in parasitic gap constructions, or (in general) for the well-known across-the-board effects within coordinate structures.
Most researchers now agree that subcategorization correlates significantly with semantics. But this semantic component of linking has proved elusive. Most, if not all, theories of linking have, in pratice, resorted to constructs that are syntactic diacritics. We show in this paper that the implicit syntactic diacritics that plague the basic linking constraints posited in at least some of these theories can be eliminated, provided that (i) the metalanguage in which linguistic constraints are written allows for true implicational statements; (ii) one is willing to slightly increase the number of linking constraints. We focus in particular on the linking theory presented in Davis and Koenig 2000, Davis 2001, and Koenig and Davis 2000, but we maintain that our arguments apply, mutatis mutandis, to many other linking theories. We note some of the consequences of this view of linking, including: linking constraints are stated in terms of semantically natural classes of situations, a single entailment of a verb's argument is sufficient to determine its linking, and interaction among linking constraints restricts the range of possible lexical items.
In this paper we investigate the factors conditioning a morphological alternation on verbal heads in Lai. We show that this alternation eludes a simple characterization and instead exhibits a many-to-many form-function mapping. We will further show that the facts can be given a straightforward analysis in terms of default conditions based on valence and polarity, together with various constructional overrides. Our analysis thus follows recent proposals in HPSG, in particular Malouf (forthcoming), in using a constructional type hierarchy with defaults (cooperating constructions) as an alternative to an Optimality Theoretic system of ranked violable constraints.
In Jaeger (to appear) I have described clitic doubling in Bulgarian wh-interrogatives which constitutes a type of Superiority violation that cannot be accounted for by any existing analyses. By showing that clitic doubling of object wh-phrases marks topicality, I raised the hypothesis that many (or maybe all) so called Superiority effects in Bulgarian are due to topic-fronting of wh-phrases. Here, I provide further support for this hypothesis and show that there is also evidence for topic-fronting of non-object wh-phrases. Differences between colloquial and formal Bulgarian are restricted to how topical objects have to be realized at the source of the extraction (i.e. the VP), which also makes the account readily extendable to other multiple fronting languages. The complex ordering constraints on the left periphery are captured in a Linear Syntax approach (similar to but different from Kathol 2000).
In this article, the so-called wh-relative clause construction is investigated. The German wh-relative clauses are syntactically relevant as they show both, root clause and subordinate clause properties. They matter semantically because they are introduced by a wh-anaphor that has to be resolved by an appropriate abstract entity of the matrix clause. Additionally, the wh-relative clause construction is discourse-functionally peculiar since it evokes coherence. Besides these interesting empirical characteristics, whrelatives raise important theoretical questions. It is argued that the standard HPSG theory has to be extended to account for non-restrictive relative clauses in general, and to cope with the particular properties of the wh-relative construction.
This paper provides a constraint-based account of information-prosody correspondence within the HPSG framework. The starting point of the paper is Klein's (2000) account of prosodic constituency in HPSG. However, it departs from the standard syntactocentric architecture of grammar, and adopts a grammar design in which syntax, phonology, and information structure are generated in parallel, with all three applying to a common list of domain objects. It is shown that this theoretical architecture elegantly captures many of the various constraints that have been shown to hold in classical views of grammar.
This paper is concerned with such concepts as topic, focus and cognitive status of discourse referents, which have been included under the label information structure (alternatively information status), as they are related in some sense to the distribution of given and new information. It addresses the question of which information structural properties are best accounted for by grammatical constraints and which can be attributed to non-linguistic constraints on the way information is processed and communicated. Two logically independent senses of given-new information are distinguished, one referential and the other relational. I discuss some examples of linguistic phenomena that pertain to each of these different senses and show that both are linguistically relevant and must be represented in the grammar. I also argue that phenomena related to both senses have pragmatic effects that do not have to be represented in the grammar since they result from interaction of the language system with general pragmatic principles that constrain inferential processes involved in language production and understanding.
In this paper we present an analysis of English measure noun phrases. Measure noun phrases exhibit both distributional idiosyncrasy, in that they appear in positions normally filled by degree adverbs: "a ten inch long string"; and agreement discord: "ten inches is enough", "it is ten inch/*inches long". The analysis introduces one idiosyncratic construction, the Measure Phrase Rule, which links together syntax and inflectional morphology. Combined with existing rules, in particular the Noun-noun Compound Rule, the new rule accounts for the both the distributional and agreement idiosyncrasies. The rule has been implemented and tested in the ERG, a broad-coverage grammar of English. Our analysis supports the position that broad-coverage grammars will necessarily contain both highly schematic and highly idiosyncratic rules.
The paper investigates a complex word order phenomenon in German and the interaction of syntax and information structure it exemplifies: the occurrence of subjects as part of a fronted non-finite constituent and particularly the so-called definiteness effect excluding (many) definite subjects from this position. We explore the connection between focus projection and the partial fronting cases and show that it is the subject of those verbs which allow their subject to be the focus exponent that can be included as part of a fronted verbal constituent. In combination with the observation by Webelhuth (1990) that fronted verbal constituents need to be focused, this provides a natural explanation of the definiteness effect in terms of the information structure requirements in these sentences. Interestingly, the generally ignored exceptions to the definiteness effect are predicted by our analysis; we show that they involve definite noun phrases which can bear focus, which allows them to be part of a fronted verbal constituent. Finally, building on the integrated grammatical architecture provided in De Kuthy (2002), we formulate an HPSG theory which captures the interaction of constraints from syntax, information structure and intonation.
Much literature in syntax has assumed that all noun phrases are categorically headed by the determiner or the noun, with well-formedness categorial in nature. In this paper I develop a theory of noun phrase structure in which both categories project noun phrases, arguing that this better fits the indeterminacy of the criteria often cited for determining headedness (Zwicky, 1985, inter alia). The only categorial differences between determiners and nouns are their semantics and selectional restrictions, and the conditions that determine well-formedness are semantic in nature. Specifically, a well-formed noun phrase must have some restrictive semantics associated with nouns coupled with some operational semantics associated with determiners (e.g. as a generalized quantifier), and from this I show how we can derive structural well-formedness. Thus the need for categorial well-formedness is nullified, providing an analysis with greater cross-linguistic import, being compatible with languages without determiners.
While French degree words in French have been assigned several syntactic categories, we show that they are rather highy polymorphic adverbs (they occur in all syntactic domains), which select the expression they modify on a purely semantic basis. Like French adverbs in general, they occur both to the left and to the right of the head they modify. Following previous work (a.o. van Noord and Bouma 1994, Abeillé and Godard 1997, Bouma et al. 2000), we assign them two different grammatical functions, adjuncts and complements. Semantically, they differ from quantifiers. We follow Kennedy (2000) who analyzes them as scalar predicate modifiers. Finally, the specific syntactic constraints that characterize a subset of them can be shown to follow from, or be related to, their weight properties (Abeillé and Godard 2000). We conclude that their apparently idiosyncratic properties fit into a more general theory of grammar.
Leaving aside elliptical coordinations, it is striking that no agreement has been reached on the structure of basic coordinate constructions. We propose that:
- coordinate constructions are structurally asymmetric: the conjunction makes a subconstituent with one of the conjuncts.
- such constituents can have several functions: coordinate daughter, adjunct daughter or main clause.
In order to show that some conjuncts should be analysed as adjuncts, we focus on asymmetric cases of coordination, in which the order of the conjuncts cannot be reversed, taking examples from French, Welsh and Korean. We present an HPSG analysis which treats the coordinating conjunctions as weak heads, with lexical subtypes, and coordinate phrases as multi-headed constructions, with different subtypes.
It is generally accepted among psycholinguists that real-time human sentence processing proceeds incrementally from left to right. Recently proposals have been made in the domain of syntax to reduce phenomena which have hitherto been accounted for in terms of linguistic performance to linear structures given at the level of competence. Keeping in line with this tendency in research, this paper tries to reestablish the much discussed relationship between the two aspects of language, competence and performance: the issue of processing difficulty dependent on sorts of multiple clause embedding is addressed by incorporating into HPSG a mechanism reflecting left-to-right processing and memory costs calculated at each processing step.
This paper deals with case marking in auxiliary verb constructions (AVCs) in Korean, and investigates how the case marking pattern in AVCs can be explained in terms of structural case resolution in the spirit of Pollard 1994, Heinz & Matiasek 1994, and Przepiórkowski 1999. In this paper, a new set of data involving various combinations of auxiliary verbs is presented to point out problems for both transformational analyses based on head movement and previous HPSG analyses in which the final auxiliary verb solely determines the case of the complements of the whole complex predicate. This paper shows that while most auxiliary verbs "inherit" the case marking property of the preceding verb, the auxiliary verbs siph- 'want' and ha- 'act like' have an additional property of assigning nominative and accusative case, respectively, to their complements. The actual case assignment by these auxiliary verbs is made possible, however, depending on what other kind of auxiliary verbs they are combined with. Based on the complex predicate analysis of AVCs, this paper proposes that complicated case patterns in AVCs can be accounted for by classification of verbs/auxiliary verbs via distinct feature values and by the mechanism of structural case resolution.
The aim of this paper is to present a theory that explicitly characterizes patterns of summative agreement. The proposed theory builds on my own theory of PNR, presented in Yatabe 2001, and is based on the view that agreement results from a non-lexical constraint that regulates under what circumstances a domain object can be merged with other domain objects by the compaction operation.
As the name of the framework suggests, one of the driving forces behind traditional HPSG analyses is the notion of head. With the exception of a few non-headed constructions (i.e., mostly coordination), constructions are typically seen as being headed by a particular word or phrase with the nonhead constituting a complement, specifier or adjunct. The head determines the internal composition of a phrase and is responsible for its external distribution. Moreover, syntactic headedness, as determined by morphosyntactic criteria, is typically assumed to coincide with semantic headness. In the case of NPs, for instance, this means that the semantic contribution (including the index) of the entire phrase is provided by the element that is the head by morphosyntactic criteria (typically the noun).
In this paper, we intend to challenge this view of heads on the basis of two constructions from English. In both instances, we will argue that the constituents that are responsible for the internal combinatorial make-up of the phrase do not constitute heads because they fail both to determine the external distribution of the phrase and to contribute the semantic index of the projected phrase. At the same time, however, we will show that it is possible to view these cases not as random departures from more well-behaved headed constructions, but instead as particular instantiations of more general construction types which do not impose strict conditions on external headedness.
In this paper we investigate the phenomenon of verb-particle constructions, discussing their characteristics and the challenges that they present for a computational grammar. We concentrate our discussion on the treatment adopted in a wide-coverage HPSG grammar: the LinGO ERG. Given the constantly growing number of verb-particle combinations, possible ways of extending this treatment are investigated, taking into account the regular patterns found in some productive combinations of verbs and particles. We analyse possible ways of identifying regular patterns using different resources. One possible way to try to capture these is by means of lexical rules, and we discuss the difficulties encountered when adopting such an approach. We also investigate how to restrict the productivity of lexical rules to deal with subregularities and exceptions to the patterns found.
This paper presents a descriptive overview of liaison, giving an idea of the scope of the phenomenon and possible approaches to its analysis. As for the contextual conditions on liaison, in many cases, the traditional notions of obligatory and prohibited liaison do not reflect speakers' actual behavior. It turns out that general syntactic constraints cannot determine the systematic presence or absence of liaison at a given word boundary. At best, specific constraints can be formulated to target particular classes of constructions. To express such constraints, I propose a system of representation in the framework of HPSG. The use of EDGE features (introduced by Miller (1992) for a GPSG treatment of French) provides the necessary link between phrasal descriptions and the properties of phrase-peripheral elements.
The structure Accusativus cum Infinitivo (AcI) has been observed in a number of languages, amongst them Latin. Morphologically it consists of an NPacc and a VPinf . In Latin however, a finer distinction has to be drawn, as was already noticed by Bolkestein (1976) who differentiates "between actual accusative cum infinitive clauses and constructions existing of an object-noun in the accusative caseform and a complementary infinitive"(1976:263).
In this paper I develop a unified analysis of the Japanese passive, which provides a uniform syntactic/semantic representation of the alleged varieties of passives (direct, indirect, possessive) as a complex predicate that encodes the triadic relation of "lack of control" among an agent, undergoer and event. Various differences among the direct, possessive, and indirect passives (the adversative effect implicature, the possibility of reflexive binding, the animacy constraint on the subject, etc.) are explained as cooperative effects of the core syntactic/sematic properties of the passive morpheme -(r)are and functional/pragmatic factors like conversational implicature and empathy constraints.
Bulgarian Vocative in HPSG
(2003)
Crosslinguistically vocatives are an underexplored linguistic phenomenon and in different languages they can be highly idiosyncratic and complex (Levinson, 1987, p.71). Therefore, the problem, which is discussed in this paper, is not a language-specific one, in spite of the fact that most of the languages have their own repositories for marking the role of the addressee in the communicative utterances.
In our opinion this linguistic phenomenon needs its adequate treatment in HPSG because of three main reasons:
1) The vocative is supposed to be present on two levels: syntax and pragmatics. Therefore it needs more elaborate interpretation on the interface side, which, in HPSG, is more developed for morphology/syntax and syntax/semantics than syntax/pragmatics. Note that a challenge for the theory is the semantic weight of the vocatives with respect to the head sentence.
2) It will be useful for HPSG-oriented implementations, especially treebanks and dialogue systems.
3) On prosodic grounds the vocatives are often viewed as being 'side or extended parts' of the sentence and therefore - very close to the parenthetical constructions. From our point of view, both phenomena are pragmatic and hence, the treatment of vocative, presented here, could be generalized to cover other phenomena of pragmatic nature.
In our work the vocatives are viewed through the possibility of the integration/separation of their pragmatic, syntactic and semantic properties.
I examine Spanish and French agreement in sentences with "affective" N/A de N constructions, in terms of an agreement theory growing out of Pollard and Sag (1994, §2) and Kathol (1999), with a distinction between two kinds of agreement relations: index agreement and morphosyntactic concord. The application of this theory to hybrid nouns (Wechsler and Zlati'c, 2000) extends straightforwardly to affective constructions. Furthermore, Kathol's characterization of the difference between hybrid nouns in Spanish and French, which I pair with an interpretation in terms of the default unification mechanism of Lascarides and Copestake (1999), turns out to make correct predictions about subtle differences in predicate agreement with affective constructions in the two languages.
Free relatives in German basically behave as NPs. As is first noticed by Groos and Riemsdijk (1981), an interesting property of free relatives that they do not share with ordinary relative clauses is that the relative pronouns are sensitive to matrix case requirements as well as to subordinate ones.
The aim of this paper is to provide a semantic account of valence alternations in Modern Greek of the following general form:
(1) NPk V NPi [P NPj] —> NPk V NPj [P NPi]
In other words, the valence alternations in Modern Greek we focus on in this paper are the ones involving direct internal arguments (i.e., objects) and indirect prepositional complements. Such alternation patterns in Modern Greek characterize mainly the behaviour of verbal predicates which participate in the so-called Locative Alternation phenomena.
Ever since Chomsky's "On Wh-Movement" (Chomsky 1977) it has been assumed that topicalization and wh-question formation can be analyzed as instances of the same operation. Leaving certain features aside, this proposal carries over to the analysis of unbounded dependency constructions in HPSG since structurally, topicalization does not differ from wh-question formation in the analysis suggested in Pollard & Sag (1994: 157-163). In the present paper, we challenge this assumption and suggest an alternative analysis of unbounded dependency constructions. Here, topicalization and wh-question formation are considered as structurally different at least in certain languages. They may, however, be structurally identical in other languages. This difference is empirically reflected in patterns of relative clause extraposition. As has been pointed out by Culicover & Rochemont (1990: 28), an extraposed relative clause must not take an antecedent contained in a VP if the VP is topicalized but the relative clause is not.
Few ideas have proven as influential within the HPSG-based literature on German verb clusters as Hinrichs and Nakazawa's (1989) idea of argument composition. Its basic idea is that in verb clusters, the arguments of a main verb are realized as the dependents of the auxiliary which governs that main verb, and not directly as dependents of the main verb. Thus, for instance in (1a), the tense auxiliary haben governs the transitive main verb gewinnen. As the head of the cluster gewonnen hat, the auxiliary haben effectively takes over the arguments from the main verb.
Prenominals in Dutch
(2003)
For modeling the internal structure of noun phrases (Pollard and Sag, 1994, 385) treats the noun as the head and classi£es its dependents in terms of a three-fold distinction, £rst proposed in Chomsky (1970), between complements, adjuncts and speci£ers. For a phrase like the expensive picture of Sandy the structure looks as follows.
Clitic Climbing Revisited
(2003)
Presently, there is overall consent among researchers on Romance in HPSG (Miller and Sag, 1997, Abeillé et al., 1998, Monachesi, 1996, 1999) that bounded clitic climbing (CC) is best understood in terms of argument composition. Despite the fact that all current analyses of CC are based on the same core idea, individual analyses of this phenomenon differ.
In this paper, I shall propose a unified approach that will be applicable to CC in both French and Italian. The approach will be cast entirely in terms of valence lists, argument structure and slash, such that construction- or language-specific book-keeping devices can be eliminated. As a side-effect, this approach provides a more strengthened view of lexical integrity, in that morphological information, i.e. an argument's mode of realisation, will not be directly accessible for subcategorisation.
In terms of truth conditional meanings, there is no clear difference between (Korean) IHRCs (internally head relative) and EHRCs (externally headed relative). In the analysis of IHRCs, of central interest are thus (a) how we can analyze the constructions in syntax and (b) how we can associate the internal head of the IHRC clause with the matrix predicate so that the head can function as its semantic argument, and (c) what makes the differences between the two constructions. This paper is an attempt to provide answers to such recurring questions within the framework of HPSG.
Downward Unbounded Discontinuities in Korean: An IPSG Analysis of Concord Adverbial Constructions
(2003)
Although there is a lot of literature dealing with the classification and distribution of Korean adverbials, there does not seem to be any satisfactory work. This is partly due to the properties of the adverbials themselves, whose classification and distribution vary depending not only on the lexical properties of each adverbial but also on its distributional environment. However, the distinction between “regular adverbials” and “concord adverbials (CAs)” is very clear and plays a significant role in elucidating the properties of the adverbials as a whole. Theformer have only the function of modifying other phrases, while the latter show a correspondence to some specified elements in the sentence. One of the major differences between them is that a CA and what it corresponds to can be separated from each other unboundedly acrossclausal boundaries.
Unbounded dependency constructions in Irish, such as relative clauses, can be made with both gaps, as in (1), and resumptive pronouns, as in (2) (examples from (McCloskey 1979)):
(1) an fear a dúirt mé a shíl mé a beadh _ann
the man AL said I AL thought I AL would-be _there
'the man that I said that I thought would be there'
(2) an t-úrscéal ar mheas mé gur thuig mé é
the novel AN thought I GO understood I it
'the novel that I thought I understood'
This paper will sketch an HPSG treatment of such constructions and their interactions with the distribution of the sentence-initial particles GO, AL, and AN. We focus particularly on relative clauses and constituent questions but believe that the same analysis can be extended to other gap and resumptive constructions. We analyze resumptives with a nonlocal feature RESUMP which is propagated like the SLASH feature used for gaps. This is supported by the existence of a particle pattern that marks intermediate clauses in resumptive dependencies. We also discuss some exceptional particle patterns associated with bare NP adverbials and shown how they can be incorporated into the analysis, though certain unresolved problems remain.
References
McCloskey, J. (1979). Transformational Syntax and Model-Theoretic Semantics: A Case Study in Modern Irish. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Remarks on Marking
(2002)
This paper calls for a reexamination of the Marking Theory of HPSG, which in its standard form involves a considerable amount of dedicated formal machinery, but which proves to be inapplicable for most types of grammatical marking. As an alternative, it is demonstrated that head-marker phrases can be reanalyzed as head-complement structures, with the marking element treated as the syntactic head. This approach allows the elimination of all marking-specific formal apparatus, with the exception of the attribute MARKING, which percolates as an ordinary HEAD feature, and whose function is significantly expanded.
The proposed approach allows marking elements to be related to other lexical heads (prepositions, in particular), and marking constructions are better integrated in the grammar, rather than being grouped into an exceptional class of head-marker phrases.
The fact that inflectional affixes always attach to the verbal stem leads to the bracketing paradox in the case of particle verbs since the semantic contribution of the inflectional information scopes over the complete particle verb. I will discuss nominalizations and adjective derivation, which are also problematic because of various bracketing paradoxes. I will suggest a solution to these paradoxes that assumes that inflectional and derivational prefixes and suffixes always attach to a form of a stem that contains the information about particles already, but without containing a phonological realization of the particle. The particle is a dependent of the verb and is combined with its head after inflection and derivation. With such an approach no rebracketing mechanisms are necessary.
This paper challenges the assumption that the nature of apparent word order and verb form irregularities in the German verbal complex is that of an irreducible cluster of idiosyncrasies surrounding an exceptional word order possibility. I discuss two lesser known sets of data which raise serious problems for the traditional 'idiosyncrasy-based' analysis. I conclude that the verbs in the upper-field are exceptional in a 'deeper' sense, in that they do not construct as ordinary syntactic heads. Instead they seem to behave more like functional elements as characterized by Abney (1987). On the basis of such a revised syntactic analysis most of the unexpected word order and verb form irregularities resurface as related regular properties.
In this paper, we use lattice theory to present an account of neutralization and coordination of unlikes that can easily be incorporated into current HPSG, where linguistic objects are modelled as totally well-typed, sort resolved feature structures. The account draws on the analysis of Levy 2001 and is consistent with the HPSG analysis of neutralization proposed by Levine et al. 2001. We show the essential properties required of a coordination/neutralization lattice, and argue that our analysis is the minimal lattice satisfying these requirements. The HPSG-based account of the same phenomena presented in Daniels 2001 of this collection is shown by lattice-theoretic methods to be essentially equivalent to ours.
This paper proposes a constraint-based, comprehensive analysis of the Internally-Headed Relative Clause (IHRC) in Japanese which is able to accommodate the synchronic properties as well as the diachronic change that IHRC went through. This paper claims that IHRC should be defined as a special type of non-head daughter of the main predicate. The predicate is subcategorized for a clause, while it calls for an entity-like argument. The multi-level architecture of HPSG accommodates the apparent syntax-semantic mismatch. The IHRC is syntactically a clausal complement, while it is not semantically selected by the main predicate. The main predicate, on the other hand, selects an entity as its argument, but the entity is not syntactically given. I claim that the syntax of IHRC specifies this much. The rest, or the actual linkage between the predicate and the semantically required target entity is semantically or pragmatically achieved. Drawing on the ideas of Argument Realization and Argument Extension with the postulation of the interface level DEPENDENTS proposed in Bouma et al. (2001), I have demonstrated how the present proposal can connect the clausal complement, IHRC, and adverbial clauses, thus providing the structural aspect of the motivation for the diachronic change.
This paper investigates the syntax of head-marking constructions, specifically those with nominals heads. The data are drawn from Luiseño, a Uto-Aztecan language from Southern California. The first construction involves the morphological marking of possessors on possessed nouns. I show that a natural account can be given if possessed nouns are considered lexeme-level expressions derived from underspecified nominal lexemes. A separate mapping is responsible for relating nouns (possessed or unpossessed) to fully case-inflected word-level expressions. I then show how elements of this analysis can be adapted to account for periphrastic expressions of oblique cases with animate nouns. In such cases, the head is a case-inflected pronominal head that takes a full noun phrase as an optional specifier. I conclude with some remarks on the relationship between the proposed analysis for nominal head-marking constructions and the treatment of nonconfigurational properties more generally.
Case-matching effects in in German VP coordination and German free relatives have received a fair amount of attention in recent syntactic theorizing and have been cited by Ingria (1990) as a potential challenge to constraint-based and unification-based approaches to syntax such as HPSG and LFG.
This paper considers another construction in question: case-matching phenomena in Bavarian relative clauses, for which Bayer (1983) develops an inherently derivational account. The present paper offers a purely declarative account of Bavarian relative clauses in HPSG and shows that the analytical tools provided by unification-based or constraint-based grammar formalisms completely suffice to provide a fully adequate and comprehensive analysis of the data.
We present an approach to VP ellipsis that allows the direct derivation of source and target sentences (the former need not be unique) during semantic construction. Specific syntactic constituent structures are associated with ellipsis potential, which can then be discharged by pro-verbs like did (too). The determination of source and target sentence, which is done with semantic features in an HPSG framework, is coupled with a comprehensive analysis of ellipsis, which also handles its interaction with scope and anaphora.
This paper investigates a particular word order phenomenon in German, the occurrence of discontinuous NPs (which we refer to as the NP-PP split construction) in order to probe the division of labor between the syntactic analysis and discourse constraints on this construction. We argue that some of the factors which previous literature has tried to explain in terms of syntactic restrictions are in fact derivable from discourse factors. Building on these insights, we show how an information structure component can be integrated into an HPSG account of the phenomenon.
(Ingria 1990)'s claims that both feature neutrality, where a sign acts in a sentence as though it simultaneously had multiple values for a single feature, and the coordination of unlike categories, where the features of two or more conjuncts differ from each other, pose fundamental problems for unification-based theories of grammar do not apply to constraint-based theories like HPSG.
New types can be introduced into the hierarchy of appropriate values for any given feature that directly represent neutralizations and coordinations. In this manner, feature neutralization and the coordination of unlikes are seen to be different aspects of the same problem: how to determine the values of a coordinate mother's features from those of its conjuncts.
One of the controversial issues in English stylistic inversion (SI) construction (e.g., Into the room walked a woman) is the functional status of preverbal PP and postverbal NP. Based on the distributional parallels among the PP, NP, ordinary subject and topic, this paper proposes that the PP in SI has a dual function as a subject and topic, while the NP also has some subject properties that the PP does not have. These mixed functional properties of the PP and the 'double' subject properties of SI are analyzed in the theory of HPSG, especially with the versions recently developed by Sag 1997, Manning and Sag 1999 and Ginzburg and Sag 2001, which posit the notions of the multiple type inheritance hierarchy and dissociation between the argument and valence structures. This analysis claims that the SI construction needs to simultaneously satisfy two general, independent constraints, head-subject-phrase and head-filler-phrase, as well as the construction specific lexeme-level constraint. This view suggests that the English SI construction is an instance of peripheral phenomena whose construction specific constraints are inherited from more general core constraints.
The Korean Light Verb Construction (LVC) contains a Sino-Korean main predicate (tayhwa-lul), a Light Verb (ha-ta), and semantic arguments of the main predicate (John-i, Tom-kwa):
John-i Tom-kwa tayhwa-lul ha-yess-ta.
John-Nom Tom-with talk-Acc do-Pst-Dc
'John talked with Tom.'
We defend a three-part analysis: (i) The subject of the main predicate is thematically controlled by the LV's subject. Evidence: Korean verbs assigning Accusative take an external argument (Wechsler/Lee 1996; Burzio's Generalization). Since the main predicate is Accusative, ha-ta must theta-mark its subject. Moreover ha-ta selects a non-stative Verbal Noun (VN) (cp. *kyumson-ul ha-ta 'humble-Acc do-Dc'); non-stative theta-structures typically take an external argument (Kang 1986). This control arises through complex predicate formation. (ii) Oblique arguments (PPs) are optionally transferred (cp. Grimshaw/Mester 1988) — but Accusative NPs are not. Evidence comes from relativization and pronoun replacement. (iii) Accusative is assigned by a mixed category Verbal Noun. This can be supported by adverbial clauses with VN's assigning Accusative without LV's. We review cross-linguistic evidence for both argument transfer (German; Hinrichs & Nakazawa; i.a.) and mixed categories (many languages, Malouf; i.a.) and show that Korean LVCs provide the right environment for both to occur.
I present a treatment of the Dutch R-pronouns in HPSG drawing on Linearization Theory as developed in Reape (1996) and Kathol (1995,2000). R-pronouns in Dutch are a set of locatives which also serve as pronominal arguments of prepositions, and as such may form non-local dependencies. Linearization and techniques of domain union, compaction and partial compaction allow for a straightforward analysis of these dependencies. I focus my analysis on the light R-pronoun er, and its iteration with two homophonous items, the quantitative and expletive ers.
Using the sign/construction distinction developed in Donohue and Sag (1999) and Sag (2001), I implement Kathol's notion of partial compaction in constraints on constructions of type prepositional-phrase, noun-phrase, etc. This places the phonological content of the R-pronoun or quantitative er in the DOMAIN list as a free agent, able to appear in the clause disconnected from the original selector. This use of linearization also permits a haplology rule to capture the idiosyncratic co-occurrence behavior that occurs when multiple functions of er appear together within a clause.
Departing from the exhaustive indexation, syntax-driven approach to binding, we argued for an alternative, semantics-oriented rationale for binding principles. Under this new understanding of the nature of grammatical constraints on anaphoric binding, these principles are viewed as contributing to circumscribe the contextually determined semantic value of anaphoric nominals. This conceptual shift helps to find a fully fledged formal specification of binding principles with the HPSG lean description formalism where these constraints are entered in the grammar as part of the information kept at the lexical entries of anaphoric expressions.
This paper presents a general approach to verbal inflection with special emphasis on suppletion phenomena. The paper focuses on French, but the approach is general enough to apply to a wide variety of languages.
In the first part of the paper, we show that suppletion is not erratic: suppletive forms tend to always appear in groups, in definite areas of verbal paradigms. Our analysis is based on the observation of a number of dependency relations between inflectional forms of verbs (somewhat similar to rules of referral (Zwicky 1985, Stump 1993)). We define for each language a stem dependency tree based on these observations, which allows one to predict the whole paradigm of every verb in the language on the basis of a minimal number of idiosyncratic stems. We use the tree to minimize the quantity of redundant phonological information that has to be listed in the lexicon for a given lexeme, assuming that an optimal analysis of inflection should be able to derive all and only intuitively predictable inflectional forms from a single representation.
The second part of the paper attempts to integrate the analysis in an HPSG hierarchical lexicon. Morphological dependency relations are represented directly by mentioning a lexical sign in another sign's lexical entry. The approach to suppletion proposed in the first part is made explicit using a combination of online type construction and default constraints on the phonology of dependent signs.
This paper proposes an HPSG account of the French tense and aspect system, focussing on the analysis of the passé simple (simple past) and imparfait (imperfective) tenses and their interaction with aspectually sensitive adjuncts. Starting from de Swart's (1998) analysis of the semantics of tense and aspect, I show that while the proposed semantic representations are appropriate, the analysis of implicit aspectual operators as coercion operators is inadequate.
The proposed HPSG analysis relies on Minimal Recursion Semantics to relate standard syntactic structures with de Swart-style semantic representations. The analysis has two crucial features: first, it assumes that the semantic contribution of tense originates in the verb's semantic representation, despite the fact that tense can get wide scope over other semantic elements. Second, it allows the occurrence of implicit aspectual operators to be controlled by the verb's inflectional class, which accounts for their peculiar distribution.
This paper builds on Zwicky's (1986) notion of shape condition, that is, a rule that specifies the phonological shape of inflected forms "by reference to triggers at least some of which lie outside the syntactic word". Zwicky observes that "many rules traditionally classified as external sandhi rules are [shape conditions]". They are not phonological rules in the usual sense, since they only apply to specific lexical items and are active within syntactic rather than phonological domains.
Shape conditions are problematic in many standard grammar architectures. On the one hand, they seem to be constraints on lexical entries, while on the other hand, they make reference to the syntactic context. Hayes (1990) has sketched a theory of "precompiled phrasal phonology" in which allomorph choice is conditioned by subcategorization frames in lexical entries. However, his approach is not formalized in any detail, and moreover makes the implicit claim that the relation between a shape condition target and its triggers can be equated with the syntactic relation between a lexical head and its complement. Although this assumption holds good for the Hausa phenomena he addresses, we do not believe that it holds in general.
HPSG appears to offer promising framework for formalizing something like Hayes' approach, but the standard machinery also makes it hard to distinguish a shape condition trigger from a complement. In order to overcome this difficulty, we develop the notion of phonological context: a feature of signs which allows us to condition allomorphic alternation in terms of (i) the phonological edges, and (ii) the syntactic properties of an expression's immediate syntactic sisters. We show how our analysis deals with four illustrative cases: the indefinite article alternation in English, syncretic liaison forms for possessive pronouns in French, Hausa verb-final vowel shortening, and soft mutation in Welsh nouns.
Glue semantics for HPSG
(2002)
The glue approach to semantic interpretation has been developed principally for Lexical Functional Grammar. Recent work has shown how glue can be used with a variety of syntactic theories and this paper outlines how it can be applied to HPSG. As well as providing an alternative form of semantics for HPSG, we believe that the benefits of HPSG glue include the following: (1) simplification of the Semantics Principle; (2) a simple and elegant treatment of modifier scope, including empirical phenomena like quantifier scope ambiguity, the interaction of scope with raising, and recursive modification; (3) an analysis of control that handles agreement between controlled subjects and their coarguments while allowing for a property denotation for the controlled clause; (4) re-use of highly efficient techniques for semantic derivation already implemented for LFG, and which target problems of ambiguity management also addressed by Minimal Recursion Semantics.
In this paper, I argue (i) that Japanese has constructions that are almost the exact mirror images of the right-node raising constructions in English, and (ii) that the properties of those constructions, which I refer to as left-node raising constructions, can be captured straightforwardly if and only if the CONTENT values of domain objects, not those of signs, are assumed to be the principal locus of meaning assembly. In the theory proposed, it is claimed that semantic composition (including "quantifier retrieval") takes place not when some signs are syntactically combined to produce a new, larger sign but when some domain objects (which are essentially prosodic constituents) are merged (by the total or partial compaction operation) to produce a new domain object (i.e. a new, larger prosodic constituent).
Since the introduction of the X-bar principles it is commonly assumed that prepositions are heads of PPs, in the same way as nouns and pronouns are heads of NPs. However, while this is well motivated for a large majority of the pronouns and the prepositions in many languages, there are also exceptions. More specifically, Van Eynde (1999) argues that the reduced or minor pronouns of Dutch — as opposed to their full or tonic counterparts — cannot head an NP, and the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that there are also prepositions which cannot head a PP. The first section introduces the distinction between major and minor categories. The second shows how it can be applied to the prepositions and presents a way of treating minor prepositions in HPSG. The third singles out the Dutch te(to) as a plausible candidate for a minor preposition treatment, and the fourth provides criteria for the identification of other minor prepositions. The concluding section points out the wider significance of these findings.
One kind of relative clause in Modern Hebrew is formed with a gap, as in (1a). However, in certain situations, the gap can be replaced by a resumptive pronoun, as in (1b):
(1a) ha-yeled she ra'iti
the-boy that saw-1.SG
(b) ha-yeled she ra'iti 'oto;
the-boy that saw-1.SG him;
the boy that I saw
Some previous approaches, such as (Borer 1984) and (Sells 1984), have treated gaps and resumptives with different mechanisms. This paper examines several properties that Hebrew resumptive pronouns share with gaps, motivating a more unified treatment in HPSG using non-local feature propagation for both. This machinery is then used in the analysis a variety of Hebrew relative clause phenomena, including in situ resumptive pronouns, fronted resumptive pronouns, relative clauses lacking a complementizer, bare gap relatives, and subject-verb inversion.
References
Borer, Hagit (1984). "Restrictive relative clauses in Modern Hebrew." Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 2:219-260.
Sells, Peter (1984). Syntax and Semantics of Resumptive Pronouns. Ph.D. Thesis, UMass Amherst.
This paper presents a dynamic semantic approach to the licensing of Polarity Sensitive Items (PSIs) and n-words of Negative Concord. We propose that PSIs are unified by the semantic scale property, which is responsible for their sensitivity to the context; we develop a semantic licensing analysis based on Fauconnier's (1975) scales and Ladusaw's (1979) notion of entailment. The first part of the paper concludes with a formalization of semantic licensing in the sense of Ladusaw (1979) within HPSG (see, e.g., Pollard & Sag (1994)) which allows for a uniform treatment of the licensing of PSIs and n-words of Negative Concord and accounts for the disambiguating nature of PSIs in scopally ambiguous sentences.
The second part of the paper is concerned with the limitations of semantic licensing, which, we claim, needs to be sensitive to the context. We present the discussions of, e.g., Heim (1984) and Israel (1996) with respect to the importance of the context in particular licensing constellations, and then turn to linearity constraints on licensing. We present data from German which may not be accounted for by linearity constraints and sketch an analysis for this data which supports the necessity of context-sensitive semantic licensing.
One of the major controversies in present-day HPSG is whether the information about a word's argument structure should also be available on this word's phrasal projections. Some works assume that ARG-ST is present on words only; this is the claim of, e.g., Pollard and Sag 1994, Miller and Sag 1997, Abeillé, Godard and Sag 1998, and Bouma, Malouf and Sag (to appear). The reason for this assumption is that it leads to more restrictive grammars: with this restriction, words cannot select their arguments on the basis of the argument structure of these arguments' heads (e.g., there seems to be no language in which a verb selects exactly VPs with an NP[dat] argument). On the other hand, various other works assume the presence of the complete information about a word's argument structure on this word's phrasal projections. This is the stance of, e.g., Grover 1995 (to formulate a fully nonconfigurational binding theory), Frank 1994 (to deal with verb second in German), Frank and Reyle 1995 (to account for the interactions between scope and word order in German), Calcagno and Pollard 1997 and Abeillé and Godard 2000 (to analyze French causatives), Baxter 1999 (in an account of purpose infinitives in English), and Meurers 1999 (to deal with case assignment in German verb clusters).
In this paper, I endeavor to make two kinds of linguistic contribution.
On the theory-internal side, I argue that the issue whether ARG-ST or any such attribute should be present at the level of possibly saturated phrases, in addition to its presence on words, is not an "all or nothing" issue. Although I show that there are some environments in Polish which do seem to require the presence of ARG-ST on phrases, I also link this presence to the common feature of such environments, namely, to their semantic vacuity (understood in the sense of Pollard and Yoo 1998). Although no formal proof can be given that this is the only possible analysis, I try to proceed carefully by examining a variety of possible alternatives and showing that all of them fail in one way or another.
Since semantically vacuous environments are extremely rare, the resulting grammar is not less restrictive than, say, a grammar which allows a verb to subcategorize for a lexical argument (and, hence, have access to this argument's ARG-ST), a possibility often taken advantage of in HPSG analyses of complex predicates in various languages.
On the empirical side, I look at two rarely considered and ill-understood constructions in Polish, namely, at "long raising" across a preposition, and at case agreement with predicative phrases. Neither of these constructions has been successfully analyzed so far. Although the analyses proposed in this paper may be perceived as less than satisfactory on the aesthetical side, they constitute the first formal and uniform account of these phenomena.
In this paper I show that object to subject raising approaches as suggested by Pollard (1994) and Müller (1999) are problematic since they cannot account for adjective formation in a satisfying way. The approach by Heinz and Matiasek (1994), which is a formalization of Haider's (1986) ideas, cannot account for modal infinitives and control.
I develop a lexical rule based approach and it will be shown that this approach also extends to tricky cases of remote passive.
Directional Serial Verb Constructions (Directional SVCs), which are a subset of Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) in Thai and involve motion-related verbs, are studied in this paper. According to two syntactic tests, two phrase structural schemata are involved in Thai Directional SVCs, including a recursive VP-over-VP structure and a complementation structure. Thai Directional SVCs also exhibit a dissociation between constituent structure and linear order. With this distinctive syntactic structure, Thai Directional SVCs are not reduceable to previously described SVCs. Nevertheless, within Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, the rich featural specifications of heads and the mechanisms available for the percolation of specific head properties in a default interpretation of the Head Feature Principle allow for a straightforward model of Thai Directional SVCs.
The complement structure of tough constructions containing VP complements with gap sites linked to the tough predicate subject has been subject to considerable discussion in the syntactic literature, with an apparent consensus that in "John is easy for us to please, for us" is a PP constituent which controls the subject specification of the following infinitival constituent. I reexamine the classical arguments for this position, including Bresnan's seminal 1971 paper which first argued for this control structure analysis, and argue that none of these arguments are empirically tenable. In all cases, data exist which convincingly undermine central claims or assumptions, and hence there turns out to be no convincing reason to prefer the control structure over the clausal analysis, introduced in Postal's 1971 monograph on crossover and defended in the Gazdar et al. monograph on generalized phrase structure grammar, in which for us to please is a clausal complement to easy. I then offer a number of arguments for the superiority of the clausal analysis, appealing to data from comparatives, parasitic gap constructions and extraposition. My claim that tough complementation of the kind alluded to is clausal must, if sound, be compatible with standardly assumed semantics for these constructions, in which the subject of the complement clause must also serve as an argument of the tough predicate — a conclusion seemingly at odds with a clausal complement syntax. The difficulty is that a constituent whose denotation is one of the terms in the relation denoted by the tough predicate must be retrieved from with a clause, where it is presumably inaccessible under normal Montegovian compositional assumptions. I offer further cross-linguistic evidence based on Guyanese Creole that such an apparent conflict between syntax and semantics is unavoidable, and then offer a syntactic solution, based on work by Detmar Meurers which posits a HEAD feature for verbs structure-shared with their SUBJspecification. This device, which also can be argued for in English on the basis of the Richard construction and several other phenomena, offers a way for information about the subject to be accessible to specifications of the selecting head in a way which compromises locality to the minimal extent possible.
This paper focuses on the semantic properties and the syntactic behaviour of Modern Greek (hence MG) Experiencer-Subject Psych Verb Constructions (hence ESPVCs).
MG ESPVCs include verbs like miso (hate), agapo (love), or latrevo (adore), which feature a nominative experiencer in agreement with the verb and an accusative theme (see examples (1)-(3)). MG ESPVCs include also predicates like fovame (fear), which feature an experiencer-subject in agreement with the verb and either an accusative theme (example (4)), or a theme as the object of a prepositional phrase (example (5)). We should underline here that examples (4) and (5) below convey the same meaning. That is, they do NOT differ semantically.
O Gianis misi to sholio.
the Gianis.N hate.3S the school.A
"John hates school."
O Gianis agapa tin Maria.
the Gianis.N loves.3S the Maria.A
"John loves Mary."
O Gianis latrevi tin musiki.
the Gianis.N adore.3S the music.A
"John adores music."
I Maria fovate tis kategides.
the Maria.N fear.3S the storms.A
"Maria is afraid of the storms."
I Maria fovate me tis kategides.
the Maria.N fear.3S with the storms.A
"Maria is afraid of the storms."
The challenge that constructions like the ones in (4) and (5) pose lies on the split syntactic realization of the "experienced" (hence EXPD) semantic role (i.e., the theme), which in constructions like (4) is syntactically realized as the object of the sentence, while in constructions like (5) it is syntactically realized as the object of a prepositional phrase.
Our aim is to propose a unified linking account of the MG ESPVCs. This unified account
1) is based on the assumption that the individual denoted by the object NP (or PP) of the MG ESPVCs is entailed to be semantically underspecified, and
2) makes use of Wechsler's (1995) Notion Rule, Davis and Koenig's (2000) linking theory, as well as Markantonatou and Sadler's (1996) proposal for the linking of indirect arguments.
References
Davis, A.R. and J.-P. Koenig (2000). Linking as constraints on word classes in a hierarchical lexicon. Language 76, 56-91.
Markantonatou, S. and L. Sadler (1996). Linking Indirect Arguments. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 9, 24-63.
Wechsler, S. (1995). The Semantic Basis of Argument Structure. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Series: Dissertations in Linguistics, Joan Bresnan, Sharon Inkelas, William J. Poser, and Peter Sells (eds.).
This paper discusses the behavior of picture NP reflexives in German and English. Taking the analysis of Pollard/Sag (1994) as a starting point, we show that their main conclusion for English, viz. that picture NP reflexives are exempt from Principle A, does not apply to German. As a first step, we present an alternative formulation of Principle A for German. But the principles proposed for German and English do not offer any explanation for the universal behavior of anaphors if they cannot be related to each other. We thusn propose a more general Principle A to hold universally. Individual, language-specific instantiations of this Principle A are derived from determining certain parameter settings.
The so-called 'double' or 'multiple' nominative constructions (henceforth DNC or MNC) have been one of the puzzling phenomena in topic-prominent languages like Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. One intriguing property of the MNCs is that there is no conceptual limit to the number of nominative nominals as long as the two consecutive nominatives are in a certain semantic relation. This paper provides a 'head-driven' and 'constraint' based analysis in the sense that the lexical head and the tight interaction among declarative constraints play a crucial role in the formation of puzzling DNCs/MNCs. This analysis captures the gramamtical/functional properties of each nominative phrase in these constructions in a precise way, while describing the close specifier-head relation between the two consecutive nominatives without violating the locality principle. The analysis eventually allows us an explicit grammar for generating DNCs/MNCs in Korean. This is achieved through the familiar mechanism of argument composition and constraints on the lexical heads such as noun and verb.
The so-called was-w-construction in German has received a fair amount of attention in recent syntactic theorizing. Most of the discussion has focused on the properties of was.
One line of research maintains that was is a scope marker that indicates the semantic scope of the wh-phrase in the embedded interrogative clause. The alternative view, usually referred to as the indirect analysis, was first developed with respect to Hindi (Dayal 1994) and then generalized to German (Dayal 1996). It holds that the was of the was-w-construction is associated not with the embedded wh-phrase, but rather with the embedded clause as a whole.
Hinrichs and Nakazawa present some novel evidence in favor of an indirect analysis of the was-w construction. However, the main focus of their research is on two questions that by comparison have received little attention, namely:
1. what is the set of matrix predicates that can enter into this construction, and
2. how can one account for the curious fact that predicates that ordinarily do not license wh-complements allow such complements in the was-w-construction?
On the basis of Ginzburg and Sag's verb classification (Ginzburg and Sag, in preparation) Hinrichs and Nakazawa identify a natural class of predicates that license this construction and utilize the notion of type coercion to account for the apparent mismatch between the syntactic form of the embedded interrogative and its semantic function.
This presentation is essentially a "guided tour of interesting sites" of the Norwegian language: passive, presentational constructions, anaphora and V2 patterns. The data is related to issues concerning Argument Structure and whether the analysis of root clauses in Norwegian should include a node "C" hosting the finite verb. The paper points to areas of Norwegian grammar which constitutes possible challenges to central proposals made in the HPSG literature, but, in addition, it sketches possible analyses within the HPSG framework.
This paper examines the distribution of English self-pronouns (himself, herself, etc.) in contrast with personal pronouns. We confirm that there are factors affecting the acceptability of self-pronouns at the syntactic, semantic, and discourse levels, and devise a Principle A with three distinct clauses to account for all of them. Each clause is crucially ordered with respect to the others, with syntax taking precedence over semantics, which in turn takes precedence over discourse constraints.
We discuss evidence in Halkomelem, a Coast Salish language of British Columbia, which supports the hypothesis put forward by Manning and Sag (1999) that a universal passive argument structure (ARG-ST) is complex and has two a-subjects. We argue that morphological and syntactic control phenomena in Halkomelem are best described by saying that an a-subject is accessible, where an a-subject is the first argument on an argument structure list.
ARG-ST <bi <a, Proi, ...>>
The Halkomelem passive data show that two notions of subject are essential for capturing control phenomena. One set of constructions-motion auxiliaries, desideratives, and reflexive causatives-involve linking to the internal a-subject. One construction-the control construction–links to either the highest a-subject or the internal a-subject. Similar conclusions have been drawn for data from Russian (Perlmutter 1984), Philippine languages (Schachter 1984), and other languages of the world. As Manning and Sag (1998) point out, one does not have to draw the conclusion that passive must be given a multilevel syntactic analysis from such data. Rather, their analysis of passive, which posits a complex argument structure, easily accounts for Halkomelem. Control facts in Halkomelem, with examples drawn from both morphological and syntactic constructions, can be added to the catalog of phenomenon that support this view of the passive.
A number of the languages of Polynesia, including Tongan and Samoan, display a process whereby a pronominal argument of the main predicate of a clause appears to be realized as a preverbal 'second position' (2P) pronoun. All other arguments, if overt, are realized postverbally, the languages being rigidly predicate-initial. This paper examines the characteristics of these pronouns in Tongan arguing that in most cases they are best treated as distinct words in their own right (though often phonologically deficient) while in a handful of cases they are affixal material composed morphologically with a preceding preverbal Tense/Aspect Marker (TAM). Despite the fact that Tongan preverbal pronouns clearly do not appear in a typical argument position, standard approaches to 2P pronominal elements (e.g. 'clitic climbing' and 'prosodic inversion') do not seem naturally applicable to the Tongan data. The relation-based analysis provided here exploits a natural consequence of various potential definitions of 'subjecthood' within HPSG, treating the preverbal pronouns as the (unique) instantation of the valence feature SUBJ and correctly blocking the possibility of the pronoun appearing in true second position above the TAM when a clause-initial conjunction is present, except in particular specified circumstances. Thus the Tongan pronouns are not strict '2P' elements despite the fact that they most often appear in second position in a clause.
In this paper, we present a surface-based analysis of a specific type of French parenthetical adjunct clauses introduced by the adverb comme (similar to as in English). The construction we focus on belongs to the domain of reported speech, and we call it reportive-comme clause (RCC). The set of data we consider exhibits a large amount of notable properties that can only be fully explained under the assumption of constructional constraints. Therefore, following Sag (1997) and Abeillé et al. (1998), we base our approach on the central notion of "construction". We claim that RCCs are adverbial extraction contexts. We integrate them in a cross-classified typed hierarchy as a subtype of relative clauses, and a subtype of head-adjunct and head-filler phrases. Semantic specifications of RCCs are expressed with constraints on different levels. We draw a general distinction between head-modifier adjuncts and parenthetical adjuncts in order to account for the fact that parenthetical adjuncts do not contribute the referential content of the head phrase they selected for. We posit two subtypes of RCCs determined by a Direct speech (and quotative) vs. Indirect speech distribution of properties. The two sets of defining constraints allow to characterize the restricted classes of verbs possible in the different RCCs, the syntactic realization (gap or pronominal affix) of their object argument and its anaphoric semantics. This treatment constitutes a more general proposal for direct speech or quoted argument selection, which is known as a puzzling problem of the syntax-semantic interface. It innovates in presenting a formalized account of reported speech phenomena and present a typed-based classification of the semantic relations of reported speech predicates.
Formalized as a systematic interaction between a tier of co-arguments and a tier of co-dependents, the concept of diathesis offers a considerable theoretical advantage in stating linguistic generalizations. Based on Slavic data, this paper argues for the general notion of dependents in HPSG, in addition to arguments and subcategorized elements (valence). It attempts to provide a systematic inventory of ARG-ST / DEPS mappings which results in a diathetic paradigm. The approach offers an insightful cross-linguistic and cross-constructional perspective.
In French, Italian, and Romanian, forms inherited from the Latin paradigm 'esse' are used for the copula, the passive auxiliary and tense or perfective auxiliaries. We show that the copula and the passive auxiliary should be identified, while the tense or perfective auxiliaries are different lexemes. Moreover, the copula has the same description across all the Romance languages. While they all are argument inheritance verbs, the copula and the tense or perfective auxiliaries differ with respect to their complement structure: (i) the second only have one complement structure (the complement participle is complement unsaturated), the copula has two complement structures (the predicate is either complement saturated or unsaturated); (ii) French and Italian tense auxiliaries are the head of a flat VP, where the participle is sister to its subcategorized complements, the Romanian perfective auxiliary is the head of a verbal complex; (iii) when the complement predicate is unsaturated, the Romance copula is the head of a flat VP.
Two consequences of the analysis are worth mentioning. First, the copula (and the passive auxiliary) should not be taken into account when stating the environments for auxiliary selection in French and Italian. Second, argument inheritance and complement structure are different phenomena, and argue in favor of theories which systematically distinguish between valence features and constituent structures.
Darlegung der strategische Entwicklung der FID der Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg aus fachlicher und struktureller Sicht: in Hinblick auf ihre Rolle als Partner für die Wissenschaft, der Synergien an der UB JCS durch sechs FID und ihre Positionierung im FID-Netzwerk.
Die strategische Entwicklung der FID aus technischer Sicht wird in Hinblick auf Infrastruktur, Datenmanagement und Community-Arbeit vertieft.
FID Afrikastudien | africanstudieslibrary.org
FID Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft | avldigital.de
FID Biodiversitätsforschung | biofid.de
FID Darstellende Kunst | performing-arts.eu
FID Jüdische Studien | jewishstudies.de
FID Linguistik | linguistik.de
In a similar way to dramatic performances and plays, song lyrics establish a complex discourse structure whereby listeners are placed in a position to overhear ‘the pretence of a conversation constructed to convey the performer’s meaning’ (Nahajec 2019: 25; see also Short 1996: 169). In Taylor Swift’s songwriting, listeners are positioned not only to eavesdrop on the narratives presented but are also invited to conceptualise and enact particular roles and scenarios in the discourse. This paper offers a stylistic analysis of songwriting and narrative structure across Swift’s oeuvre to identify how disnarration strategies are used to build stories in her two sister albums written and produced during the Covid-19 pandemic, folklore (2020) and evermore (2020). Specifically, this study examines how disnarration characterises the albums’ narrators, establishes narrator-narratee relationships and invites listeners to adopt a participatory role in the meaning-making process. Through close analysis of four songs across the two albums, this paper builds on developing studies of the stylistics of songwriting (see West 2019) and argues that disnarration strategies foreground particular themes within the discourse, such as nostalgia, wistfulness and regret, and contribute to the fictionalisation and self-aware storytelling characteristic of these albums’ storyworlds.
Der inhaltlich umfassende Sammelband von Sarah Brommer und Christa Dürscheid bündelt vorrangig Forschungsarbeiten von Studierenden, die sich im Feld der Mensch-Mensch- und Mensch-Maschine-Kommunikation in einer sich stetig technisch weiterentwickelten Welt verorten. Die Forschungsarbeiten, die im Rahmen des Seminars "Mensch. Maschine. Vertrauen." an der Universität Zürich im Wintersemester 2019 entstanden sind, nehmen verschiedene Kommunikationssituationen und aktuelle Phänomene in den Blick, die bis dato noch als Forschungsdesiderate zu konstatieren sind: z. B. (A) Formen interpersonaler Mensch-Maschine-Kommunikation in medialen Formaten wie WhatsApp oder Tinder, (B) Perspektiven auf Streitgespräche mit Robotern oder die Frage nach Vertrauen im Umgang mit Pflegerobotern, (C) Kommunikationssituationen mit Siri oder Smart Homes und (D) Biohacking als technische Entwicklung in Bezug auf das Einsetzen von u.a. Chips in den menschlichen Körper. Insgesamt beinhaltet der Band zwölf Beiträge, die sich überwiegend zunächst aus linguistischer Perspektive den Forschungsgegenständen nähern und diese dann weiterführend in ethische Fragen und gesellschaftspolitische Zusammenhänge einbetten.
Funktionsverbgefüge stehen seit jeher in der Sprachkritik, die sich nun auch auf digitale Räume ausbreitet. Vertreten wird dort die These, Funktionsverbgefüge und ihre entsprechenden Basisverben seien äquivalent und könnten in allen Kontexten durch die verbalen Entsprechungen ersetzt werden. Dies kann durch die vorliegende korpusbasierte und textlinguistische Studie am Beispiel des Gefüges Frage stellen widerlegt werden. Anhand eines extensiven Datenmaterials aus den Wikipedia-Artikel-Korpora des IDS zeige ich die semantischen, grammatischen und textlinguistischen Unterschiede zwischen dem Basisverb und dem Funktionsverbgefüge im Gebrauch auf, die sich in der Anreicherung, Verdichtung, Perspektivierung, Gewichtung und Wiederaufnahme von Informationen im Text manifestieren.
Während es jedem unbenommen ist, eine Sprache oder einen Dialekt schön oder häßlich zu finden, wird immer wieder versucht, sprachästhetische Urteile zu begründen. In diesem Essay werden Urteile über die deutsche Sprache gesammelt und linguistisch betrachtet, d.h. nicht nach den sozio-kulturellen Assoziationen, die sie auslöst (Giles/Niedzielsky 1998: social connotation hypothesis), sondern nach sprachlichen Merkmalen (inherent value hypothesis), was Versuche nicht ausschließt, sozio-kulturelle Assoziationen linguistisch zu legitimieren. Konsens scheint darüber zu bestehen, daß die romanischen Sprachen, und unter diesen besonders das Italienische, schöner klingen als die germanischen Sprachen, und unter diesen besonders das Deutsche, während das Deutsche durch Ableitung und Zusammensetzung Wortbildungsmöglichkeiten hat und nutzt, die anderen Sprachen versagt sind. Was die Aussagekraft solcher Vergleiche mindert, ist ihr Eurozentrismus; ästhetische Urteile über „exotische“ Sprachen sind noch selten.
The aim of this article is to show how linguistic and literary studies can benefit from the joint analysis of linguistic structures in poetry. Firstly, the analysis of poetry has an important impact on linguistic theory as it leads our attention to specific structures and meanings that so far have not been considered. Secondly, a close linguistic analysis can reveal hitherto overlooked facets of meaning which have a great significance for the overall interpretation of a poem. We focus on Bare Root Infinitives (BRIs) in German. As they lack the features for tense, mood, person and number, they are more flexible in meaning than finite forms. When looking at poetry, besides the well-known deontic and bouletic meanings (cf. Reis 1995, 2003; Gärtner 2014) a third meaning that we call reactive meaning stands out. Remarkably, this reactive meaning can also be found in everyday language. Its specific semantic properties show that a semantic analysis of BRIs in the style of Kaufmann (2012) is adequate: modality, but not non-referentiality, is a grammatically given semantic property of BRIs. The specific case study of the poem ‘muster fixieren’ (‘fixing patterns’) by Nico Bleutge reveals how the restricted context of the poem interacts with the different interpretations of BRIs, resulting in a complex interpretation of the text.
The (mis)management of rapport amongst groups in Niger Delta (ND) communities has become a significant issue, which Ahmed Yerima's Hard Ground (HG) depicts as having the capacity to aid or control the conflicts in the region. Linguistic studies on Yerima's drama from the perspective of pragmatics have tended to use pragmatic acts to identify the discourse value of proverbs and functions of characters' utterances but have not accounted for the politeness strategies utilised for rapport management, especially in conflict situations. This article, drawing on a rapport management model of politeness and aspects of speech act discourse, identifies the face, sociality rights, and interactional goals that characterise the conflict-motivated dialogues sampled in HG, and reveals the rapport management (RM) strategies through which these are managed in the text. Three conflict situations can be observed as prompting different RM strategies: cause-effect identification (CEI), militancy support (MSP), and disagreement (DSG) situations. CEI is marked by incriminating (involving eliciting and informing acts) and exonerating (including complimenting and acknowledging acts) strategies; MSP is indexed by strategies of persuasion (realised with face-enhancing/threatening acts), whereas DSG is typified by requesting (featuring explicit head acts and alerters) and blaming strategies (including insulting and threatening, aggravating moves). Generally, the requesting, blaming, and exonerating strategies are largely used by the ND youth in HG to probe, threaten, or disagree on specific issues, while the incriminating and persuasion strategies are mainly employed by the women to indict, influence, and predict future actions. The study of RM in the conflict situations depicted in the play sheds light on the often neglected cause of conflicts in contemporary Africa.
Social media, asthe fifth estate, increasingly influence public dis-courses and play a major role in shaping public opinion.Undoubt-edly, they have the potential to promote participation and democra-cy. On the other side, they also constitute a risk for democratic soci-eties, as the spread of hate speech and fake news has shown. As aresponse,forms of counterspeech organisedby civil society have emerged in social media to counter the normalisation of hate speech and democracy-threateningdiscourses. In order to influence dis-course in social media in terms of the fifth estate, counterspeech campaigns must be visible alsoquantitatively. In this ethnographic contrastive study, I analysed the activitiesof the German and Finn-ish Facebook groups of the network #iamhere international. The in-tensity and continuity of their activities is obviously influenced by their strategic organisation: conventionalised rules support them whereas lacking or inconsequent rules seemed to be counterpro-ductive.
Teil I Bestandsaufnahme und strategische Entwicklung
Teil II IT-Umsetzung der FID-Strategie
beteiligte FID:
FID Afrikastudien | africanstudieslibrary.org
FID Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft | avldigital.de
FID Biodiversität | biofid.de
FID Darstellende Kunst | performing-arts.eu
FID Germanistik | germanistik-im-netz.de
FID Jüdische Studien | jewishstudies.de
FID Linguistik | linguistik.de
As kindergartens and schools closed down during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, two hashtags emerged on Twitter: #CoronaEltern (#CoronaParents) and #CoronaElternRechnenAb (#CoronaParentsDocumentTheCosts). In this paper, we examine the positioning practices around both hashtags as expressions of “digital activism” (Joyce 2010: VIII). One characteristic of the hashtag campaign is that political demands are hardly ever made directly. Rather, the participants resort to five main linguistic patterns: (1) they address different target groups; (2) they refer to different protagonists; (3) in the subcorpus #CoronaEltern specifically, they constitute themselves as a collective through (4) the recurring use of first-person narratives; (5) and generalization and typification. Our findings show that #CoronaParents are not just parents in times of a pandemic: #CoronaParents are only those who see themselves as such, participating in an evolving, at times misunderstood community.
This dissertation investigates a special class of anaphoric form, yè, in Ewe known as the logophoric pronoun. This research makes a number of novel observations.
In the first chapter, I introduce the reader to the phenomenon under investigation as well as provide information on Ewe and its dialects and, methodology. In Chapter 2, I present the pronominal system of Ewe which is categorised into strong and weak forms following Cardinaletti & Starke (1994) and Agbedor (1996). The distribution of pronouns is outlined which sets the tone for an overview of logophoric marking. In this respect, I present variations in logophoric marking strategies cross linguistically and show that Ewe differs significantly from other pronouns in this category. In an effort to explain the deviant case of yè, I entertain the idea that yè is a pure logophoric pronoun in the sense of Clements (1975) and thus, its additional de re and strict interpretation does not imply non-logophoricity.
Chapter 3 demonstrates that yè is sensitive to contexts which portray the intention of an individual. Following Sells (1987), the antecedent of yè must have an intention to communicate. I broadly categorize logophoric contexts into reportative (direct-indirect speech) or non-reportative (speaker’s mental attitude, reporter’s observation or background knowledge of a situation). Based on this categorization, indirect speech report (Clements 1975), dis- course units such as a paragraph or an episode (Clements 1975), and sentential adjuncts such as purpose, causal and consequence clauses (Culy 1994a) are reviewed. The logophoric pro- noun occurs in the complement of attitude verbs (Clements 1975), also termed logocentric (à la (Stirling 1994)) or logophoric predicates (à la (Culy 1994a)) as well as with non-attitudinal verbs (e.g. va ‘come’ or wO ‘do’ as in sentential adjuncts). I argue contra Clements (1975) and Culy (1994a) that yè can occur with perception predicates. I further provide three new instances of non-reportative contexts which are compatible with yè namely, as-if clauses, benefactive na clauses and alesi ‘how’ clauses. I show, corroborating previous studies that contexts which are necessary for the licensing of yè include all of the aforementioned except causal clauses. Among these contexts, the complementizer be or regarding cases where there is no be, an element in C (due to the Doubly-Filled-Comp Filter (DFCF) c.f. Chomsky & Lasnik (1977)), is sufficient to license yè. Following Bimpeh & Sode (2021), yè is licensed by feature checking (in the spirit of von Stechow (2004)): be bears the interpretatble [log] feature which checks the uninterpretable [log] feature of yè. I include a redefinition of logophoricity as pertaining to Ewe.
Given the disparity found in the literature concerning the interpretation of yè: Ewedome (pronounce EVedome) has only de se readings (Bimpeh 2019); while ‘pure’ Ewe, Mina (variety of Ewe spoken in Togo) Pearson (2015), Danyi (O’Neill 2015) and Anlo (pronounced ANlO) (Satık 2019) has de re readings; chapter 4 aims at lending empirical support to the ungoing discussion by verifying the interpretation of yè. Two acceptability judgment tasks were conducted namely, truth value judgment task and binary forced choice task. The results corroborates Pearson (2012, 2015) and others’ discovery that yè has a de re interpretation in the Ewedome (contra Bimpeh (2019); Bimpeh et al. (2022)), Anlo and Tonu (pronounced TONu) dialects of Ewe.
In chapter 5, I discuss the relation between logophoricity (yè, yè a) and Control (PRO). I show that yè may be restricted to a set of verbs which obligatorily require the morpheme a ‘potential marker’ (Essegbey 2008), in subject position. This set of verbs are those that are known as control verbs c.f. (Landau 1999) in English. As a result of this restriction, research such as Satık (2019) claims that yè a is the overt instantiation of PRO in English. According to the Ewe facts, it appears as though on one hand, yè and PRO share similar properties in logophoric contexts and on the other hand, yè in combination with the potential marker, a also share properties with PRO in subject control environments. Against this background, I discuss the relation between yè, yè a and PRO and show that neither yè in isolation nor yè in combination with a, contrary to Satık (2019), is the overt instantiation of PRO. I clarify that the potential morpheme a is not cliticised or combined with the logophoric yè. The two forms are seperate morphemes. The potential marker a only shows up in control environments because a sub-class of verbs require it for grammaticality purposes. As such, the property of de se-ness does not come from yè by itself, yè a or a but rather from the sub-class of verbs which require the potential marker a...
Während es jedem unbenommen ist, eine Sprache oder einen Dialekt schön oder häßlich zu finden, wird immer wieder versucht, sprachästhetische Urteile zu begründen. In diesem Essay werden Urteile über die deutsche Sprache gesammelt und linguistisch betrachtet, d.h. nicht nach den sozio-kulturellen Assoziationen, die sie auslöst (Giles/Niedzielsky 1998: social connotation hypothesis), sondern nach sprachlichen Merkmalen (inherent value hypothesis), was Versuche nicht ausschließt, sozio-kulturelle Assoziationen linguistisch zu legitimieren. Konsens scheint darüber zu bestehen, daß die romanischen Sprachen, und unter diesen besonders das Italienische, schöner klingen als die germanischen Sprachen, und unter diesen besonders das Deutsche, während das Deutsche durch Ableitung und Zusammensetzung Wortbildungsmöglichkeiten hat und nutzt, die anderen Sprachen versagt sind. Was die Aussagekraft solcher Vergleiche mindert, ist ihr Eurozentrismus; ästhetische Urteile über „exotische“ Sprachen sind noch selten.
Am 5. und 6. Mai 2022 fand am Institut für Germanistik der Universität Leipzig der von Adele Baltuttis, Anna Bliß, Barbara Schlücker und dem Autor dieses Berichts organisierte internationale Workshop "Word Formation and Discourse Structure" statt. Gegenstand des Workshops war ein bisher in der Forschung weitgehend unbeachtetes Thema, nämlich die Rolle der Wortbildung für die Struktur und Verständlichkeit von Texten: Inwieweit tragen komplexe Wörter zum Strukturaufbau und zur inhaltlichen Verknüpfung über Satzgrenzen hinweg bei? Vor dem Hintergrund dieses Desiderats sollte der Workshop ein Forum bieten, in dem zu diesem Thema Perspektiven interdisziplinärer Forschung erarbeitet werden. Zwar sind bereits in den 1970er bis 1990er Jahren erste Arbeiten zur Interaktion von Wortbildung und Text- bzw. Diskurslinguistik entstanden, im Anschluss ist das Thema jedoch kaum noch verfolgt worden. Dabei fanden in der Text-/Diskurslinguistik enorme Entwicklungen statt, etwa bei der Einbeziehung neuer Methoden, insbesondere aus der Psycho- und Computerlinguistik oder hinsichtlich elaborierter theoretischer Modellierungen. Der Aspekt der Wortbildung blieb hierbei aber weitgehend außen vor. Der Workshops sollte deshalb neue und bekannte Fragen und Probleme (wieder) aufgreifen und vor dem Hintergrund der aktuellen Erkenntnisse und Methoden neu diskutieren. Das Thema Wortbildung und Diskursstruktur ist insofern ein neues und interdisziplinäres Thema, das das Zusammenspiel unterschiedlicher linguistischer Bereiche und Traditionen erfordert. Dies zeigt sich auch im Programm des Workshops, das internationale Wissenschaftler:innen aus verschiedenen linguistischen Teilbereichen (Wortbildung, historische Sprachwissenschaft, Diskurs-/Textlinguistik, Fachsprachen, Korpus- und Computerlinguistik) zusammengebracht hat.
Based on the privative derivational suffix -los, we test statements found in the literature on word formation using a – at least in this field – novel empirical basis: a list of affective-emotional ratings of base nouns and associated -los derivations. In addition to a frequency analysis based on the German Reference Corpus, we show that, in general, emotional polarity (so-called valence, positive vs. negative emotions) is reversed by suffixation with -los. This change is stronger for more polarized base nouns. The perceived intensity of emotion (so-called arousal) is generally lower for -los derivations than for base nouns. Finally, to capture the results theoretically, we propose a prototypical -los construction in the framework of Construction Morphology.
"Ausgangssperre light" und "digitales Semester" – Wortgruppenlexeme zwischen Lexikon und Syntax
(2022)
In recent years, the relation between lexicon and syntax as distinct domains has been questioned repeatedly. For all languages under discussion word-like examples that do not fit the category word have been found, so that the boundary between lexical unit and syntactic unit becomes leaky. Furthermore, relative borderlines vary from language to language. One of the problematic domains are phrasemes (phraseological units). This article concentrates on German multi-word lexemes which are very similar to compounds in respect to structure, semantics, and cognitive aspects (rechter Winkel 'right angle'). Though mostly neglected or treated peripherally, this group is not exactly small, and patterns are productive – in contrast to the rest of phrasemes. We argue in favor of a transition between words and phrases and gradient distinctions between categories and a position of the problematic examples close to compounds and rather not among phrasemes. Finally, we look at how theoretical approaches deal with the problem.