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Syncretism in German: A unified approach to underspecification, indeterminacy, and likeness of case
(2005)
In this paper I address the phenomenon of syncretism in German and show how Flickinger (2000)'s approach to related issues in English can be adapted to provide a compact, disjunction-free representation of German nominal paradigms by means of combined case/number/gender type hierarchies. In particular, I will discuss the issue of case identity constraints in German coordinate structures, which has so far prevented successful application of Flickinger's proposal to German, and show how likeness constraints targetting individual inflectional dimensions of a combined type hierarchy can be expressed by means of typed lists that abstract out the relevant dimension.
I further show that current type-based approaches to feature neutrality are unable to combine the treatment of this phenomenon with the virtues of underspecification. I will then propose a revised organisation of the inflectional type hierarchies suggested by Daniels (2001), drawing on a systematic distinction between inherent and external (case) requirements.
The Grammar Matrix is a resource for linguists writing grammars of natural languages; however, up to this point it has not included support for coordination. In this paper, we survey the typological range of coordination phenomena in the world's languages, then detail the support, both syntactic and semantic, for those phenomena in the Grammar Matrix. Furthermore, we describe the concept of a Matrix module and our software that enables grammar writers to easily produce an extensible starter grammar.
On binding domains
(2005)
In this paper I want to explore reasons for replacing Binding Theory based on the anaphor-pronoun dichotomy by a Binding Theory allowing more domains restricting/defining anaphoric dependencies. This will, thus, have consequences for the partitioning of anaphoric elements, presupposing more types of 'anaphors'/'pronouns' than standard Binding Theory offers us.
We present a novel well-formedness condition for underspecified semantic representations which requires that every correct MRS representation must be a net. We argue that (almost) all correct MRS representations are indeed nets, and apply this condition to identify a set of eleven rules in the English Resource Grammar (ERG) with bugs in their semantics component. Thus we demonstrate that the net test is useful in grammar debugging.
We examine how a large-scale computational grammar can account for the complex nature of Japanese verbal compounds. Previous computational Japanese grammars have tried to avoid the problem by simple solutions such as enumerating as many verbal compounds in the lexicon as possible. In contrast, we develop the analysis that is linguistically adequate and computationally tractable and thus meets the requirement of a syntactically and semantically precise natural language processing of Japanese like Bond et al. (2005). Our analysis distinguishes between two kinds of verbal compounds: syntactic compounds, which are fully productive; and lexical compounds, which are of varying productivity.
This paper focuses on passive constructions in Dutch. Specifically, we focus on worden, as well as krijgen passives in Dutch, for which we propose a uniform, raising analysis in HPSG. We also show that such an analysis can be carried over to account for passives cross-linguistically. Specifically, we look at corresponding structures in German and show that there is no need for a dual raising and control analysis for the German "agentive" (werden) and the German "dative" (kriegen) passives, respectively, as has been proposed in Müller (2002) and Müller (2003).
In 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.
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.
In Pollard & Sag (1994) and in Ginzburg & Sag (2000) phrases are either headed or non-headed, and if they are headed, there is a relation of selection between the daughters: either the head daughter selects its non-head sister(s), as in the phrases of type 'head-complements', or the non-head daughter selects its head sister, as in the phrases of type 'head-adjunct'. In the non-headed phrases, by contrast, there is no selection; in a coordinate structure, for instance, there is no relation of selection, neither between the conjuncts nor between the conjunction and the conjuncts. The central claim of this paper is that there are also phrases which are headed but in which neither daughter selects the other. To model such phrases I propose a new type, called 'head-independent'. Its properties are spelled out and its range of application is illustrated with various examples, including asymmetric coordination and apposition.
This paper presents an analysis of constructions involving the l-form of the verb in Polish, including primarily the past tense, the conditional mood, and the future tense. Previous approaches have attempted to treat these uniformly as auxiliary verb constructions. We argue against a unified treatment, however, in light of synchronic and diachronic evidence that indicates that only the future tense and the conditional still involve auxiliaries in modern Polish. We show that the past tense is now a simple tense, although the l-forms appear in combination with agreement affixes that can appear in different places in the sentence. We provide an account of the common linearization properties of the past tense markings and the conditional auxiliary. We present a detailed HPSG analysis of the past tense construction that relies on the introduction of two interacting agreement features. We then discuss the consequences of our proposals for the analysis of the conditional and future auxiliary constructions, and finally, we offer a treatment of constructions involving inflected complementizers in Polish.
It has been commonly assumed since Chomsky (1981) that the distribution of reflexive pronouns is subject to Binding Condition A. Reinhart and Reuland (1993) formulate Condition A in terms of the notion of syntactic predicate. The proposal I will develop in this paper is to factor out semantic and syntactic conditions on the occurrence of reflexive pronouns and to reduce them to independently motivated semantic and syntactic mechanisms. The semantic part is attributed to a theory of semantic composition recently developed by Chung and Ladusaw (2004), while the syntactic residue falls into the proper characterization of syntactic chains, as proposed by Reinhart and Reuland (1993) and Reuland (2001). To the extent that this approach is successful, Binding Condition A is rendered superfluous.
Remarks on binding theory
(2005)
We propose some reformulations of binding principle A that build on recent work by Pollard and Xue, and by Runner et al. We then turn to the thorny issue of the status of indices, in connection with the seemingly simpler Principle B. We conclude that the notion of index is fundamentally incoherent, and suggest some possible approaches to eliminating them as theoretical primitives. One possibility is to let logical variables take up the explanatory burden borne by indices, but this turns out to be fraught with difficulties. Another approach, which involves returning to the idea that referentially dependent expressions denote identity functions (as proposed, independently, by Pollard and Sag and by Jacobson) seerms to hold more promise.
In this paper, we claim that the filler-gap linkage in Korean UDCs needs to be handled at the level of syntax and that unbounded dependencies represented by traces, resumptive pronouns, and resumptive reflexives in Korean can be simply captured - without posing any extra mechanisms - in the traditional HPSG analysis of UDCs following Pollard and Sag (1994). It is because in HPSG traces are not all required to have the same feature, unlike in other movement-based approaches including the minimalist program and GB theory. In addition, we argue that the three kinds of Korean UDC elements appearing in gap positions do not form separate categories from their corresponding forms appearing in non-UDCs based on the same semantic and pragmatic properties such as logophoricity and contrastiveness. We also investigate some controversial issues of island constraints and strong crossover with respect to filler-gap linkage in Korean UDCs.
Order domains were originally proposed to deal with constituent order, but have recently been concerned with more than just linearization. This paper seeks to contribute to this discussion by considering the possibility of analysing word forms in terms of order domains. We focus on the distribution of the English relative and interrogative pronouns who and whom. It is shown that a small number of constraints can accommodate the seemingly complex body of data. In particular, a linearization-based constraint can provide a straightforward account for the quite puzzling distribution which who and whom show in one of the register types.
The present paper investigates a certain subset of clause linkage phenomena and develops a constraint-based account to the empirical fact that clauses need to be distinguished with respect to their degree of integratedness into a potential matrix clause. Considering as example German, it is shown that the generally assumed twofold distinction between main and subordinate clauses (or root and embedded clauses) does not suffice to deal with the presented data. It is argued that the discussed linkage phenomena originate from syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of the clauses involved, and should hence be encoded in grammar.
The paper reviews basic patterns of reflexive binding in Norwegian, and explores a possible implementation of them in an HPSG grammar using the LKB platform. Norwegian has two reflexive elements, with distinct constraints and corresponding 'anti-binding' effects; they can cooccur but also occur independently. As over-all strategy for resolving reflexive binding we use one resembling the 'slash' procedure for wh-dependencies. Binding constraints are imposed partly through lexical specification, partly through phrasal combination rules. Challenges are noted residing in the possibility for sentences to contain an unbounded number of reflexives.
Algorithmic approaches to anaphor resolution are known to benefit substantially from syntactic disjoint reference filters. Typically, however, there is a considerable gap between the scope of the formal model of grammar employed for deriving referential evidence and its implementation. While accounting for many subtleties of language, such formal models at most partially address the algorithmic aspects of referential processing. This paper investigates the issue of implementing syntactic disjoint reference for robust anaphor resolution. An algorithmic account of binding condition verification will be developed that, on one hand, captures the theoretical subtleties, and, on the other hand, exhibits computational efficiency and fulfils the robustness requirements. Taking as input the potentially fragmentary parses of a robust state-of-the-art parser, the practical performance of this algorithm will be evaluated with respect to the task of anaphor resolution and shown to be nearly optimal.
This paper provides a treatment of Polish Plural Comitative Constructions in the paradigm of HPSG in the tradition of Pollard and Sag (1994). Plural Comitative Constructions (PCCs) have previously been treated in terms of coordination, complementation and adjunction. The objective of this paper is to show that PCCs are neither instances of typical coordinate structures nor of typical complement or adjunct structures. It thus appears difficult to properly describe them by means of the standard principles of syntax and semantics. The analysis proposed in this paper accounts for the syntactic and semantic properties of PCCs in Polish by assuming an adjunction-based syntactic structure for PCCs, and by treating the indexical information provided by PCCs not as subject to any inheritance or composition, but as a result of applying a set of principles on number, gender and person resolution that also hold for ordinary coordinate structures.
HPSG accounts of filler-gap dependencies hold considerable potential for explaining the cross-linguistic variation in unbounded dependency constructions (UDCs), specifically filler-gap dependencies. This potential comes from the SLASH specifications that are posited in all nodes along the extraction path (the path between filler and gap). However, as Hukari and Levine (1994, 1995, 1996) have observed, the HPSG analysis presented by Pollard and Sag (1994) fails to embody the generalizations required in order to explain key universal properties of UDCs, in particular the ˋregistration' of such dependencies in cases of subject- and adverb-extraction. This demonstration led Bouma et al. (2001) to propose a revised UDC analysis that avoids these difficulties by ˋthreading' the SLASH specfications through all heads within an extraction domain. However, Levine (2002) points out that this analysis encounters a new difficulty concerning the interaction of extraction and coordination. This paper revisits these issues, arguing that a small modification of the BMS analysis provides a solution to the important problem observed by Levine.