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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.
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.
Ausgangspunkt dieses Beitrags ist die Beobachtung (cf. Seiler 1984), daß komplexe Sätze, insbesondere Komplementsätze, einerseits die Dimension PARTIZIPATION 'abschließen', andererseits aber auch über sie hinausgehen. Hier treffen offensichtlich zwei Dimensionen (im Sinne von UNITYP) aufeinander: die Dimension der PARTIZIPATION einerseits und die Dimension der NEKTION andererseits, deren generelle Funktion etwa bestimmt werden könnte als die sprachliche Darstellung von Relationen zwischen Sachverhalten bzw. Propositionen (bzw. den entsprechenden Konzeptualisierungen der Relationen zwischen Sachverhalten). Die 'Nahtstelle' zwischen den beiden Dimensionen soll hier anhand von einigen Beispielen aus dem Baskischen diskutiert werden.
In his 1995 monograph, Apresyan suggests that it would be extremely interesting to investigate the means of expressing the definiteness/indefiniteness opposition in languages that do not have articles. In this paper, I will attempt to find possible correlations between the organization of discourse and the positions in which the (in)definite nominals may appear within a sentence of Russian. I will examine the information structure of Russian sentences and, based on the previous analyses, provide a new account of their organization with respect to information packaging. I will then look at various nominal elements contained in certain parts of a sentence and arrive at a system describing the distribution of NPs in Russian with respect to the information structure. The ultimate goal of this paper is to establish and motivate a system of correlations between various types of NPs and functions of information structure. This goal will be achieved by determining which characteristic of a NP may serve as a criterion allowing to provide a one-to-one mapping.
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.
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 left periphery has enjoyed extensive study over the past years, especially drawn against the framework of Rizzi (1997). It is argued that in this part of the clause, relations are licensed that have direct impact on discourse interpretation and information structure, such as topic, focus, clause type, and the like. I take this line of research up and argue in favour of a split CP on the basis of strictly left-peripheral phenomena across languages. But I also want to link the relation of articulated clause structure, syntactic derivations, and information structure. In particular, I outline the basics of a model of syntactic derivation that makes explicit reference to the interpretive interfaces in a cyclic, dynamic manner.
I suggest a return to older stages of generative grammar, at least in spirit, by proposing that clausal derivation stretches over three important areas which I call prolific domains: the part of the clause which licenses argument/thematic relations (V- or θ-domain), the part that licenses agreement/grammatica1 relations (T- or ϕ-domain), and the part that licenses discourse/information-relevant relations (C- or ω-domain). It is thus a rather broad and conceptual notion of "adding" and "omitting" that I am concerned with here, namely licensing of material to relate to information structure, and the desire to find an answer to the question which elements might be added or omitted across languages to establish such links.
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.
Im folgenden sollen Nominalphrasen im Zentralthai auf die ihnen eigentümliche Erscheinung der Numeralklassifikatoren untersucht werden. Der inzwischen allgemein üblich gewordene Terminus Klassifikator bezeichnet eine im Thai relativ umfangreiche Gruppe von Lexemen, die als Exponenten von nach inhaltlichen Merkmalen geschiedenen Nominalklassen figurieren. Doch ist es unverkennbar, daß diesen Lexemen abgesehen von ihrer lexikalischen Funktion vor allem eine wesentliche syntaktische Funktion zukommt: denn ihr Auftreten ist an ganz bestimmte Konstruktionen gebunden. Mit dieser syntaktischen Funktion wollen wir uns im folgenden befassen.
This paper focuses on restrictions on the ordering of internal constituents of noun phrases in Chichewa, especially when those constituents are discontinuous. The motivation for discontinuity of the NP constituents will be given, together with discussion of constructions that can be subsumed under this rubric but that do not really involve discontinuity in the canonical sense. These are constructions where a topic NP in a left periphery position is either linked anaphorically with a modifier "remnant" or semantically with its hyponym in post-verbal position. According to Guthrie's classification of Bantu languages, Chichewa is placed in zone N unit N31. It is regarded as a dialect of Nyanja, classified as belonging to unit N30 (Guthrie 1967-71).
This paper investigates the binding of pronouns and reflexives in picture noun phrases, and focuses on data showing that reflexives and pronouns are not in complementary distribution in picture NPs with possessors. In particular, we discuss data showing that whereas reflexives can take either the possessor or the subject of the sentence as antecedent, pronouns are restricted to an antecedent other than the possessor phrase. We suggest that this asymmetry can be straightforwardly explained if we assume that (1) the possessor of a picture NP is not part of the head noun's argument structure and (2) Binding Theory is stated over dependents structure, the representation encompassing both a head's argument structure and other phrases dependent on it in various ways. If the possessor of a picture NP (PNP) is not part of the head's argument structure, it follows that reflexives in PNPs with possessors will be exempt from Binding Theory, which paves the way for an analysis of the reflexive data. Furthermore, we also show that if BT is regarded as defined over dependents structure, it follows that a pronoun in a picture NP with a possessor must be disjoint from that possessor phrase.
This paper discusses the NP-internal agreement strategies observed in an empirical (corpus based) study of Portuguese, and proposes an analysis which is formalized in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The empirical study suggests that what were previously thought to be rare or non-existent strategies occur with surprising frequency. Capturing these strategies poses problems for many standard approaches to agreement. The formalization shows how they can be captured with a relatively conservative extension of the existing HPSG theory of agreement.
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.