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This paper proposes a distinct approach to local binding effects for reflexives and pronominals in English whereby the nature of local binding domains is a by-product of the incremental interpretation of syntactic derivations (Uriageraka 1999, Chomsky 2000, 2001), emphasizing the role of the Conceptual /Intentional interface and the computational system (i.e. bare output conditions) in shaping general principles of grammars. A significant development of the Minimalist framework is the proposal that derivations operate through phases or multiple spell outs, which allows to reduce the strict cyclicity of derivations, and related locality effects of movement, to interface (bare output) conditions and economy conditions. In this paper I propose that incremental interpretation can further capture local binding domains effects of conditions A and B of Chomsky's (1981, 1986) Binding Theory. Basically, local binding domains are shown to correspond to accessible phase domains. Our proposal hence contrasts with standard analyses (e.g. Reinhart and Reuland 1993, Pollard and Sag 1992) that define co-argumenthood as the core factor from which binding conditions are developed. Our proposal also provides a new perspective on the core contrasts between A-chain and A-bar chain w.r.t. binding and scope reconstruction effects and argues that checking of the uninterpretable feature Case is what defines potential phase domains.
In this paper we argue that at least for some languages, when there are suitable o-commanders of its selectional domain, a reflexive in the bottom of its obliqueness hierarchy escapes exemption via a reshuffling of its local binding domain. The outcome of such reshuffling is that the local domain extends to include o-commanders of the reflexive in the subcategorization domain immediately upstairs, that is in the domain whose head predicator directly subcategorizes the domain headed by the predicator directly subcategorizing the reflexive.
In this paper we present a proposal to integrate pragmatic information, both from the preceding discourse and the extra-linguistic context, in the grammar. We provide an analysis of elliptical fragments according to how they are anchored to the context and the kind of resolution they require. We also present an alternative view about the syntax of fragments.
I examine the semantic contrasts exhibited by argument/oblique alternations (argument realization alternations where one or more participants may be realized either as a direct argument or an oblique). Previous HPSG accounts of these have proposed that alternating verbs are ambiguous, where each variant has a structured semantics that makes different participants more or less structurally prominent in the semantic representation. I argue that such accounts fail to capture the full richness of the contrasts exhibited by such alternations, and propose instead a model that derives alternations from the lexical entailments each verb associates with the alternating participant.
As has been shown in other Polynesian languages, in Tongan, adnominal elements can modify incorporated nouns in the noun incorporation construction. Two analysis are considered in this paper for understanding this construction within HPSG. The first, lexical sharing (Kim and Sells, this volume), views the verbs that include incorporated nouns as being single words corresponding to two syntactic atoms. However, this analysis makes incorrect predictions on the transitivity of incorporation clauses. A second analysis, extending Malouf (1999), views these words as verbs, but with some of the combinatorial properties of nouns. This offers both a better account of the data, and preserves the more restrictive theory of the morphology-syntax interface.
Georgian is a language allowing reflexives to be marked by ergative. The subject use of the Georgian reflexive phrase was first documented with causative verbs by Asatiani (1982). The later works such as (Amiridze and Everaert, 2000), (Amiridze, 2003), (Amiridze, 2004) discuss the use with object-experiencer verbs and transitive verbs on non-agentive reading. The present paper offers the first hand data on subject uses of the Georgian reflexive phrase with transitive verbs on their agentive reading in special contexts (such as a twin context, Madame Tussaud context, etc.) which are problematic for the Binding Theory of Chomsky (1981) as well as for the Reflexivity Theory of Reinhart and Reuland (1993). The data could be accounted for within the approach developed in (Reuland, 2001). However, the subject uses of the Georgian reciprocal ertmanet- leave the issue of subject anaphors open.
The principal aim of this paper is to present a comprehensive theory of coordination of unlikes, i.e., a theory that is capable of dealing with every phenomenon resulting from coordination of unlikes. The proposed theory accounts not just for standard cases of coordination of unlike arguments and coordination of unlike functors but also for cases involving single-conjunct agreement and what will be called each-conjunct agreement. In the course of the argumentation, it is also shown that, even in a language like English, predicate-argument agreement needs to be described in terms of a relational constraint that is not simply an identity requirement.
To model the pied piping in interrogative and exclamative clauses Ginzburg & Sag (2000) proposes a nonlocal head-driven treatment, thus emphasizing the resemblances with extraction. This treatment has a number of drawbacks: it relies on poorly motivated lexical rules and nonbranching phrase structure rules, it makes false predictions about pied piping in PPs, and it presupposes an implausible structure for NPs with predeterminers. To solve these problems I propose an alternative in which pied piping is treated as a local functor-driven dependency. Technically, the WH feature is integrated in the CATEGORY objects, and the propagation of its values is modeled by constraints which are independently needed for the treatment of other phenomena.
This paper focuses on aspects of the licensing of adverbial noun phrases (AdvNPs) in the HPSG grammar framework. In the first part, empirical issues will be discussed. A number of AdvNPs will be examined with respect to various linguistic phenomena in order to find out to what extent AdvNPs share syntactic and semantic properties with non-adverbial NPs.Based on empirical generalizations, a lexical constraint for licensing both AdvNPs and non-adverbial NPs will be provided. Further on, problems of structural licensing of phrases containing AdvNPs that arise within the standard HPSG framework of Pollard and Sag (1994) will be pointed out, and a possible solution will be proposed. The objective is to provide a constraint-based treatment of NPs which describes non-redundantly both their adverbial and non-adverbial usages. The analysis proposed in this paper applies lexical and phrasal implicational constraints and does not require any radical modifications or extensions of the standard HPSG geometry of Pollard and Sag (1994).
Relative clauses (RCs) in Persian are head-modifying constituents, all typically introduced by the invariant complementizer ke. Persian RCs are Unbounded Dependency Constructions (UDCs), containing either a gap or a resumptive pronoun (RP). In some positions only gaps are allowed, and in other positions only RPs. There are also some positions where both gaps and RPs are alternatively allowed. Illustrating the striking similarities between Persian gaps and RPs, I will provide an HPSG unified approach to take care of the dependency between the licensing structure and the gap/RP with a single mechanism, using only the SLASH feature. Similar to Pollard and Sag s (1994) approach to the bottom of the dependency, I will assume a special sign at the bottom. However, my sign may have a nonempty PHON value. I will introduce a feature called GAPTYPE which is a NONLOCAL feature whose value can be either trace or rp. I will introduce two constraints to capture the pattern of distribution of RPs and traces. At the top of the dependency, I will bind the nonempty SLASH at the complementizer point. I will propose a lexical entry for the complementizer ke that will account for the binding of SLASH by the feature BIND, which has a nonempty set as value.
In this contribution we propose a new module for handling idioms and distributional idiosyncrasies. Based on the concept by Richter/Sailer (1999) the new feature COLL (context of lexical licensing) plays the central role in our approach. We provide a way to handle decomposable and nondecomposable idioms and idioms containing bound words. Our module guarantees the co-occurrence of all idiom parts and of bound word and licensing context, respectively. A prerequisite for our analysis is a means to select for particular elements in the lexicon. We introduce another feature, LISTEME, which gives each lexical item its unique identifier andmakes it possible to select for a particular lexical word or phrase. Finally, we compare our proposal with alternative approaches and give some ideas regarding further applications beyond idiomaticity.
Japanese is often taken to be strictly head-final in its syntax. In our work on a broad-coverage, precision implemented HPSG for Japanese, we have found that while this is generally true, there are nonetheless a few minor exceptions to the broad trend. In this paper, we describe the grammar engineering project, present the exceptions we have found, and conclude that this kind of phenomenon motivates on the one hand the HPSG type hierarchical approach which allows for the statement of both broad generalizations and exceptions to those generalizations and on the other hand the usefulness of grammar engineering as a means of testing linguistic hypotheses.
This paper discusses a special kind of syntax-semantics mismatch: a noun with a relative clause is interpreted as if it were a complement clause. An analysis in terms of Lexical Resource Semantics is developed which provides a uniform account for ''normal'' relative clauses and for the discussed type of relative clause.
In Müller, 2005 I provide evidence that suggests that linearization approaches that analyze German clause structure with discontinuous constituents cannot account for the German clause structure in an insightful way. In order to eliminate the very powerful concept of linearization domains and discontinuous constituents from the grammar, analyses of other phenomena which also rely on discontinuous constituents should therefore be revised.
In this paper, I develop an analysis of German depictive secondary predicates that differs from the one suggested in Müller, 2002 by assuming binary branching structures, verb movment, and continuous constituents instead of a linearization approach. Some shortcomings of previous analyses are pointed out and it is shown how linearization constraints regarding depictive predicate and antecedent can be modeled.
In this study we show that constituency is of limited importance for a proper treatment of the interaction between the linear position of a wa-marked nominal in a Japanese sentence and possible domains of contrastive focus, and that constraints concerning contrastive focus should be represented in terms of linear order and not constituency. Linearisation HPSG, where linear order is independent from constituency, provides a good basis for an analysis. Some constraints are provided in terms of order domains, and it is shown that these constraints can deal with the phenomena in question, and that the cases problematic for the constituency-based analyses can also be accounted for by our analysis.
In this paper I present two classes of double object constructions in Modern Greek, i.e., the genitive, as well as the double accusative, ditransitive constructions. I show that these two classes differ from one another in that not both of them permit derivational processes such as the formation of adjectival passives. I also look at the case properties associated with the verbs which head Modern Greek genitive and double accusative ditransitive constructions. Finally, the analysis I propose for these constructions in Modern Greek are formalized using the Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS) framework of Copestake et al. (2001) and Copestake et al. (2003).
The Russian data presented in Perlmutter and Moore (2002) seem to call into question the standard analysis of raising within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG): In Russian, the case marking of the raising target and raising pivot does not seem to be shared. In this paper, we show that the phenomena described by Perlmutter and Moore can receive another analysis, fully compatible with HPSG's theory of raising. We argue in addition that our account leads to a slightly simpler model of the Russian data than Perlmutter and Moore's. Crucially, our analysis is only available if we avail ourselves of a rich network of language-specific constructional schemata, a stance recently advocated within HPSG, following the lead of Construction Grammar.
Linking in constructions
(2004)
In this paper I will make an attempt to show how the linking normally done in the lexicon also can be done in constructions. The motivation behind this is the flexibility it gives the grammar writer in underspecifying lexical entries. Being too rigid about linking in the lexicon may lead to unsatisfying results such as multiple lexical entries for what one intuitively feels is just one lexical entry, or alternatively, lexical rules which are not morphologically motivated. The aim is to show that this can be avoided by letting constructions introduce the linking information instead.
We present a constraint-based syntax-semantics interface for the construction of RMRS (Robust Minimal Recursion Semantics) representations from shallow grammars. The architecture is designed to allow modular interfaces to existing shallow grammars of various depth - ranging from chunk grammars to context-free stochastic grammars. We define modular semantics construction principles in a typed feature structure formalism that allow flexible adaptation to alternative grammars and different languages.
Recent analyses of mismatches at the syntax-semantics interface investigate e.g. modification of agentive nouns (Larson, 1998), modification of quantifying pronouns (Abney, 1987), or recursive modification (Kasper, to appear). Each of these analyses is tailored to a specific set of data, and it is not immediately obvious how they could be generalised to cover a larger set of data. I propose a unified analysis for these mismatches that attempts to bring out their common ground. This analysis shares some of its basic intuitions with the one of Kasper, but is more general because the mismatches are handled locally in the CONT feature. Its pivot is an elaborate syntax-semantics interface that is based on a surface-oriented syntactic analysis. This analysis generalises easily to the mismatches at the morphology-semantics interface for German separable-prefix verbs that were discussed in (Müller, 2003).
Negation and negative indefinites raise problems for the principle of compositionality of meaning, because we find both double and single negation readings in natural languages. De Swart and Sag (2002) solve the compositionality problem in a polyadic quantifier framework. The syntax-semantics interface exploits an extension of the Cooper storage mechanism that HPSG uses to account for scope ambiguities. In de Swart and Sag (2002), all negative quantifiers are collected into an N-store, and are interpreted by means of iteration (double negation) or resumption (negative concord) upon retrieval. This puts the ambiguity between single and double negation readings in the grammar, rather than in the lexical items. This paper extends the earlier analysis with a typology of negation and negative indefinites using bi-directional optimality theory (OT). The constraints defined are universal, but their ranking varies from one language to the next. In negative concord languages, the functional motivation for the marking of 'negative variables' wins out, so we use n-words. Double negation languages value first-order iteration, so we use plain indefinites or negative polarity items within the scope of negation. The bi-directional set-up is essential, for syntactic and semantic variation go hand in hand.
Linearization-based HPSG theories are widely used for analyzing languages with relatively free constituent order. This paper introduces the Generalized ID/LP (GIDLP) grammar format, which supports a direct encoding of such theories, and discusses key aspects of a parser that makes use of the dominance, precedence, and linearization domain information explicitly encoded in this grammar format. We show that GIDLP grammars avoid the explosion in the number of rules required under a traditional phrase structure analysis of free constituent order. As a result, GIDLP grammars supportmore modular and compact grammar encodings and require fewer edges in parsing.
In this paper, I shall discuss the semantic attachment of intersective modifiers in German coherent constructions. I shall show that a purely syntactic solution to the observable attachment ambiguity is undesirable for reasons of processing e ciency and/or massive spurious ambiguity. Instead, I shall follow Egg and Lebeth (1995) and propose an extension to Minimal Recursion Semantics, permitting the expression of underspecified semantic attachment. This rather trivial move, as we shall see, will not only be preferable for processing reasons, but it will also be more in line with the spirit of underspecified semantics, e ectively providing a compact representation of purely semantic distinctions, instead of unfolding these distinctions into a rain forest of tree representations and derivations. I will present an implementation of the underspecification approach integrated into the German HPSG developed at DFKI and compare its e ciency to an alternative implementation where semantic attachment is unfolded by means of retrieval rules.
Recent syntactic theory has highlighted the importance of peripheral constructions such as the comparative correlative construction. This construction involves a pair of filler-gap constructions with unusual properties. The first is a subordinate clause and the second a main clause. The construction has a number of related constructions. A version of HPSG, which assumes hierarchies of phrase types, can provide satisfactory analyses both for the comparative correlative constructions and for the related constructions. The two clauses in the comparative-correlative construction can be analysed as non-standard head-filler phrases differing from standard headfiller phrases in certain respects. The construction as a whole can be analyzed as a non-standard head-adjunct phrase, in which the head and the phrase have different categories.
This article proposes a semantics of directional expressions in Norwegian and German, regarded as VP modifiers. The analysis uses Minimal Recursion Semantics, as an integrated part of Matrix-based HPSG grammars. Directional expressions are analyzed as modifying an individual, the 'mover'. Context dependent directionals like here receive a decomposed analysis. Telicity values reflecting various types of directional and locative expressions are computed.
Within the tradition of Categorial Grammar, so-called 'non-constituent' coordination ('argument cluster' coordination and 'right node raising') has been analyzed in terms of the coordination of nonstandard constituents produced by the operations of type raising and composition. This highly successful research has expanded the domain of data that modern analyses of coordination must take into account. Recent HPSG work by Yatabe (2002) and Crysmann (2003) provides an interesting alternative approach to this problem in terms of the coordination of familiar, but 'elliptical' constituents. We argue that this approach is empirically superior to the Categorial Grammar analysis, both in terms of empirical coverage and cross-linguistic predictions. We reassess the relevant English data in small but important ways, and develop our own ellipsis analysis, building on Yatabe's and Crysmann's insights.
This paper presents an account of English non-restrictive ('appositive') relative clauses (NRCs) in the framework of 'construction based' HPSG. Specifically, it shows how the account of restrictive relative clause constructions presented in Sag (1997) can be extended to provide an account of the syntax and semantics of NRCs and of the main differences between NRCs and restrictive relatives. The analysis reconciles the semantic intuition that NRCs behave like independent clauses with their subordinate syntax. A significant point is that, in contrast with many other approaches, it employs only existing, independently motivated theoretical apparatus, and requires absolutely no new structures, features, or types.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.