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This paper describes a number of verbal argument marking patterns found in the world's languages and provides HPSG analyses for them. In addition to commonly-occurring variations of morphosyntactic alignment (e.g. nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive), this paper also presents analyses of more complex phenomena, including ergativity splits, Austronesian-style focus-case systems, and direct-inverse systems and their interaction with case.
Direct quotation raises three major problems for grammatical modelling: (i) the variety of quoted material (which can be a non linguistic behavior, or a sign in a different language), (ii) the embedding of an utterance inside another one, (iii) a special denotation, the content of the quotation being the utterance itself. We propose a unary rule, which turns the quoted material into a linguistic sign whose content is itself a behavior, which entertains a resemblance relation to the behavior demonstrated by the speaker. Syntactically, direct quotation comes in two varieties: it can be the complement of a quotative verb, or constitutes a head sentence, modified by an adjunct containing a quotative verb whose complement is extracted and identified with its local features.
In this paper we address the question of which transitive verbs allow there-insertion in Danish. We propose that two constraints have to be met in order for verbs to appear in Danish there-constructions. Firstly, as have been noted by others, an empty direct object position must be available. This constraint is not sufficient for restricting the set of verbs in there-constructions. We further propose a locative constraint. The transitive verbs allowing there-insertion will be shown to coincide with verbs that allow a locative analysis.
The information-structural status of clitic left dislocated arguments in Spanish has been argued to depend crucially on their thematic role. Earlier HPSG analyses of related phenomena in other languages do not take into account this sort of information. A formalization will be presented which can handle differences in information-structure arising from different thematic roles of clitic left dislocated phrases.
This paper examines the syntactic behaviour of two omnisyndetic coordinations (also called correlative coordinations), i.e. the disjunctive and the conjunctive types in Romanian, by explaining its data in a Romance perspective. Major issue has been whether these structures have symmetric or asymmetric structures. If all these Romance languages share a symmetric analysis for the disjunctive type Conj ... Conj, it is not the case for the conjunctive type. Our aim is to show that the postulation of a conjunctional status for the Romanian structure şi ... şi ('both ... and'), which is the most widespread view in Romanian grammars, is inadequate for the Romanian data.
The word order facts of radically non-configurational languages pose a challenge to HPSG approaches which assume both that the surface order of words is the yield of the (tectogrammatical) tree and standard HPSG-style cancellation of valence lists. These languages allow discontinuous noun phrases, in which modifiers appear separated from their head nouns by arbitrarily many other words from the same clause. In this paper, I explore an analysis which preserves tectogrammatical-phenogrammatical equivalence, and accounts for the word order facts of Wambaya with an analysis based on non-cancellation. This analysis is contrasted with other approaches to discontinuous constituents and analyses of other phenomena based on non-cancellation. Finally, I explore the implications for current models of semantic compositionality.
Non-restrictive relative clauses (NRRCs) can modify constituents which undergo 'pragmatic enrichment' when they appear in answers to questions. For example, in an interchange like: 'A: What did Jo think? B: That you should say nothing, which is surprising.' What B says is surprising is that 'Jo thinks ...' On the face of it, this might seem problematic for approaches to NRRCs which assume 'syntactic integration' and to support an 'orphan' analysis, where NRRCs are combined with purely conceptual representations. In this paper we examine a range of elliptical and anaphoric phenomena, and show that this conclusion is misplaced. In fact, the phenomena argue strongly in favour of a syntactically integrated analysis.
We contrast two types of sentences with a preposed NP in French in a construction based HPSG grammar. They differ with respect to different grammatical aspects (syntax, semantics, pragmatics and phonology), which cluster uniquely into constructions. Both are colloquial, a reason why they have been recognized only recently (see Zribi-Hertz 1986, 1996, Sabio 1995, 2006). Accordingly, we rely for the data on spoken corpora (Corpaix, CFRP) as well as on our intuitions. Both constructions involve a partitioned semantics but this mode of composition is associated with different effects. One construction is characterized semantically: the preposed NP is the theme of a categorical proposition. The other construction is characterized pragmatically: it is associated with an independent declarative clause, a typical use of which is to signal a break in the interaction.
The result of questionnaire studies are presented which shows (i) that conjuncts are scope islands in Japanese and (ii) that left-node raising can nullify such scope islands. This finding confirms the theory advanced in Yatabe (2001), in which semantic composition is almost entirely carried out within order domains, and arguably contradicts the theory proposed in Beavers and Sag (2004), which introduces a mechanism called Optional Quantifier Merger to deal with the fact that right-node raising and left-node raising can have semantic effects.
Based on Krifka (1992) and de Kuthy (2000), this paper develops an architecture for complex topic-comment structures in HPSG and applies it to predicate fronting in English with the goal of capturing the insights of Ward (1988) on this construction. We argue that predicate fronting is a distributed constructional form consisting of an auxiliary occurring in a predicate preposing phrase. The use of predicate preposing is a function of a combination of simultaneous constraints on its theme structure, its background-focus distribution, and its presuppositional structure. It is shown that these constraints can be made explicit within the HPSG architecture developed here.
This paper aims at making a general description of Chinese NPs using Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The paper introduces the basic and complex structures of Chinese NPs and then shed light on the noun-classifier matching problem when implemented in HPSG. To solve this problem, the paper tries to establish a basic grammar of Chinese NPs in the framework of HPSG, which is implemented in the LKB system. The implementation shows, although the matching problem between noun and classifier can be described in HPSG, especially by the MRS, it is still difficult to efficiently represent the semantic constrains in the LKB system.
The Big Mess Construction
(2007)
There is a construction in English, exemplified by 'how long a bridge', which is so irregular that it has been named the Big Mess Construction (Berman 1974). This paper first sketches its main characteristics and a treatment of the internal structure of the noun phrase which serves as a background for the analysis. It then presents three ways in which the Big Mess Construction can be analysed; two of them are lexicalist and are shown to be implausible; the third is constructivist and is argued to be superior. In a next step, the discussion is extended to two other types of constructions. The first concerns the English adnominal reflexives, as in 'the children themselves', and is shown to require a constructivist analysis which is similar but not identical to the one for the Big Mess Construction. The second concerns the combination of 'such' and 'what' with the indefinite article, as in 'such a pleasure'. In spite of its obvious resemblance with the Big Mess Construction this combination does not require a constructivist analysis; instead, it fits the lexicalist mould of most of the rest of HPSG.
An empirical overview of the properties of English prepositional passives is presented, followed by a discussion of formal approaches to the analysis of the various types of prepositional passives in HPSG. While a lexical treatment is available, the significant number of technical and conceptual difficulties encountered point to an alternative approach relying on constructional constraints. The constructional approach is argued to be the best option for prepositional passives involving adjunct PPs, and this analysis can be extended to create a hierarchy of constructions accommodating all types of prepositional passives in English, and the ordinary NP passive.
This paper aims to provide type hierarchies for Korean passive constructions on the basis of their forms within the HPSG framework. The type hierarchies proposed in this paper are based on the classification of Korean passives; suffixal passives, auxiliary passives, inherent passives, and passive light verb constructions. Verbs are divided into five subtypes in accordance with the possibility of passivization. We also provide type hierarchies for verbal nouns and passive light verbs.
In Sorani Kurdish dialects, the complement of a preposition can generally be realized either as a syntactic item (NP, independent pronoun or PP) or a bound personal morpheme (clitic/affix). However, the affixal realization of the complement gives rise to a range of specific phenomena. First, some prepositions display two different phonological forms depending on the realization of their complement: the variant combining with a syntactic item is referred to as ˋsimple', while the variant combining with an affixal complement is called ˋabsolute'. Furthermore, unlike syntactic complements, which are always realized locally, the affixal complement of an absolute preposition can have a non-local realization, attaching to a host with which it has no morphosyntactic relations. In order to deal with these facts, this paper proposes a classification of Sorani prepositions along two lines: the affixal versus non-affixal realization of the complement on the one hand and its local versus non-local realization on the other hand. All cases of non-local realization receive a lexical account, either in terms of argument composition or in terms of linearization constraints on domain objects.
Negative Polarity Items (NPI) are expressions such as English 'ever' and 'lift a finger' that only occur in sentences that are somehow negative. NPIs have puzzled linguists working in syntax, semantics and pragmatics, but no final conclusion as to which module of the grammar should be responsible for the licensing has been reached. Within HPSG interest in NPI has developed only relatively recently and is mainly inspired by the entailment-based approach of Ladusaw 1980 and Zwarts 1997. Since HPSG's CONTENT value is a semantic representation, the integration of such a denotational theory cannot be done directly. Adopting Discourse Representation Theory (DRT, Kamp and Reyle 1993, von Genabith et al. 2004) I show that it is possible to formulate a theory of NPI licensing that uses purely representational notions. In contrast to most other frameworks in semantics, DRT attributes theoretical significance to the representation of meaning, i.e. to a logical form, and not only to the denotation itself. This makes DRT particularly well-suited to my purpose.
Remarks on locality
(2007)
This paper proposes a modification of HPSG theory—Sign-Based Construction Grammar—that incorporates a strong theory of both selectional and constructional locality. A number of empirical phenomena that give the appearance of requiring nonlocal constraints are given a principled, localist analysis consistent with this general approach, which incorporates certain insights from work in the tradition of Berkeley Construction Grammar, as exemplified by Fillmore et al. (1988), Kay and Fillmore (1999), and related work.
Abeillé and Godard (2007) describe a variety of Spanish whose complex predicates differ structurally from the more familiar flat VP type of complex predicate common to other varieties of Spanish and Romance. I present a verb cluster analysis of this variety which both captures these structural differences, and at the same time preserves those features that are common across both construction types. Coupled with a simple morphological treatment of affixation, this analysis predicts the range of 'clitic climbing' facts. The parsimony of the affixation analysis is afforded by an alternative approach to the constraints on reflexive affix distribution in Spanish complex predicates. I depart radically from previous morpho-lexical approaches to the phenomenon, instead showing how the constraints follow from independently motivated binding principles. This approach not only handles more of the Spanish data, but also has the potential to provide a unified account of the phenomenon across Romance.
This paper is a follow up on Müller, 2006. It contains some comments on suggestions about the interaction of phrasal Constructions with constituent order that Adele Goldberg made at various occasions. In addition the paper discusses various HPSG analyses of particle verbs that assume lexical representations including phonologically specified parts of particle verb lexical entries. A recent phrasal analysis of resultatives (Haugereid, 2007) is discussed as well and it is pointed out that control constructions pose problems for phrasal analyses that do not assume empty elements but require that the subject is realized in a phrasal configuration.
Modern Hebrew is considered to be a 'partial pro-drop language'. Traditionally, the distinction between cases where pro-drop is licensed and those in which it is prohibited, was based on the person and tense features of the verb: 1st and 2nd person pronominal subjects may be omitted in past and future tense. This generalization, however, was found to be false in a number of papers, each discussing a subset of the data. Thus, contrary to conventional wisdom, dropped 3rd person pronouns subjects do occur in the language in particular contexts.
Identifying these contexts by way of a corpus-based survey is the initial step taken in this study. Subsequently, a careful syntactic analysis of the data reveals broad generalizations which have not been made to date. Thus, what was initially assumed to be a uniform phenomenon of 3rd person pro-drop turns out to be manifested in three distinct types of constructions. Finally, the proposed HPSG-based analysis incorporates insights concerning locality, correlations between finite and non-finite control, non-canonical elements, and binding.
The so-called floating quantifier constructions in languages like Korean display intriguing properties whose successful processing can prove the robustness of a parsing system. This paper shows that a constraint-based analysis, in particular couched upon the framework of HPSG, can offer us an efficient way of analyzing these constructions together with proper semantic representations. It also shows how the analysis has been successfully implemented in the LKB (Linguistic Knowledge Building) system.
Multiple nominative constructions (MNCs) in Korean have two main sub- types: possessive and adjunct types. This paper shows that a grammar allow- ing the interaction of declarative constraints on types of signs - in particular, having constructions (phrases and clauses) - can provide a robust and efficient way of encoding generalizations for two different MNCs. The feasibility of the grammar developed here has been checked with its implementation into the LKB (Linguistic Knowledge Building) system
The paper examines two verb sequencing constructions in Ga: the Serial Verb Construction (SVC) and the Extended Verb Complex (EVC). The former is an instance of a commonly recognized construction, the latter is typically found in the Volta Basin area of West Africa. EVCs are sequences of verbs functioning as single verb units relative to the syntax, but with an internal structure much like syntactic complementation. Both constructions show agreement of aspect and mood marking throughout the sequence, but with differences in exponence: in an SVC all Vs expose such marking, in an EVC only a limited (down to one) number of verbs, depending on the inflectional category. The paper presents the basic facts, based on works by Dakubu (2002, 2004, to appear), and gives an HPSG account of their morphology, syntax and semantics. The analysis is sustained by a grammar of the phenomena implemented with the 'Linguistic Knowledge Builder' (LKB), an engineering platform for natural language processing.
Licenser rules have originally been introduced in Müller (1999) as a part of a grammar based on discontinuous constituents. We propose licenser rules as a means to avoid underspecified empty elements in grammars with continuous constituents. We applied them to a verb movement analysis of the German main clause with right sentence bracket and to complement extraposition. To reduce the number of unnecessary hypotheses, we extended the licenser rule concept with a licenser binding technique. We compared the licenser rule approach to an approach based on underspecified traces with respect to processing performance. In our experiment, the use of licenser rules reduced the parse time by a factor of 13.5.
This paper examines the syntactic behavior of the Mauritian copula in predicative and extracted sentences. As it is the case in many languages, the Mauritian copula ete is absent in certain constructions: It only appears in extraction contexts. Our aim is to show that the postulation of a null copula, which has been proposed in various analyses, is inadequate for the Mauritian data. The phenomenon, as it is argued, rather lends itself to a strictly construction-based analysis within the framework of HPSG and is based on the distribution of weak pronouns and TAM markers.
Townsend and Bever (2001) and Ferreira (2003) argue that simple templates representing the most commonly used orderings of arguments within a clause (e.g., NP-V-NP = Agent-Action-Patient) are used early in sentence comprehension to derive a preliminary interpretation before a full parse is completed. Sentences which match these templates (e.g., active sentences, subject clefts) are understood quickly and accurately, while sentences which deviate from the templates (e.g. passive sentences, object clefts) require additional processing to arrive at the correct interpretation. The present study extends the idea of canonical templates to the domain of noun phrases. I report on two experiments showing that possessive free relative clauses in English, which involve a non-canonical ordering of the head noun, are more difficult to understand than canonically headed noun phrases. I propose two reasons for this finding: (1) possessive free relatives deviate from the canonical template for interpreting noun phrases; and (2) the formal cues for interpreting possessive free relatives are relatively subtle. More generally I suggest that canonical templates help constrain mismatch in language by making certain kinds of mismatches costly for language users. Finally, I argue that evidence for canonical templates fits best within a parallel-architecture, constructionist theory of grammar.
This paper discusses a non-constituent coordination construction that occurs in Russian in which constituents with different syntactic functions and different thematic roles are conjoined. These conjuncts are co-arguments of the same head and are subject to a number of idiosyncrasies.
We consider several alternative analysis of the phenomena, and conclude that these are unable to account for the full range of the facts. Thus, even though these conjuncts do not form a semantic unit, there is evidence that they do form a kind of coordination structure. The phenomena are challenging for any theory of grammar, but the syntax-semantics account that we provide involves minimal changes to standard HPSG architecture.
Three distinctions seem relevant for the scope properties of adverbs: their function (adjuncts or complements), their prosody (incidental or integrated) and their lexical semantics (parenthetical or non parenthetical). We propose an analysis in which the scope of French adverbs is aligned with their syntactic properties, relying on a view of adjuncts as loci for quantification, a linearization approach to the word order, and an explicit modelling of dialogue.
Pseudocoordination in Danish
(2007)
In this paper we propose an analysis of Danish pseudocoordination constructions. The analysis is based on a hybrid phrase hierarchy where phrase types are assumed to be subtypes of types that cut across the traditional division of phrasal types, allowing the phrase type of pseudocoordinations to be a subtype of both coordinate phrases and headed phrases, and consequently inherit properties from both types. The analysis is linearization-based. We further develop a set of constraints on the phrasal types in the hierarchy.
The hybrid phrase hierarchy and the set of constraints on the various types in the hierarchy explain why, on the one hand, pseudocoordinations contain conjunctions and the conjuncts must have the same form and tense, and on the other, have a fixed order, allow extraction out of the second conjunct, do not allow overt subjects in the second conjunct and allow transitive verbs to appear in there-constructions.
This paper proposes a projectionist account of the unexpressed object alternations in HPSG. The approach is based on the two-level mapping mechanism, developed in Manning and Sag (1998) and Sag et al (2003). The proposed analysis keeps identical argument structure values in the lexeme description of both valence alternatives, while different surface valence values are related by a lexical rule.
The HPSG model is applied cross-linguistically to English and Bulgarian. Some Bulgarian-specific traits, such as the limited alternation range and the grammaticalized aspect, related to the formal characteristics of the unexpressed object alternations, are discussed and interpreted within HPSG.
The treatment of French causatives and pronominal affixes outlined in Miller and Sag (1997) and Abeillé et al. (1998) is notable for its comprehensive coverage and analytic detail, but it relies on a number of ad hoc features and types that have little empirical justification. We sketch a new treatment of the same data set, which eliminates multiple lexical entries for the causative, as well as a number of other undesirable analytic devices. Our account builds on a long-standing observation that seeming irregularities in the system of case assignment to the causee of faire are not in fact exceptional, but determined by the general case assignment behavior of transitive verbs. This generalization, first incorporated into an HPSG analysis by Bratt (1990), was abandoned in subsequent HPSG work that sought to expand the coverage of French beyond that of Bratt's analysis. Our goal here is to show that broad coverage need not come at the expense of linguistically significant generalizations.
This paper presents an overview of a proposed linearisation grammar, which relies solely upon information residing in lexical heads to constrain word order. Word order information, which encompasses discontinuity as well as linear precedence conditions, is explicitly encoded as part of the feature structure of lexical heads, thus dispensing with a separate LP specification or 'phenogrammatical' layer standardly posited for linearisation. Instead, such lexicon-originated word order constraints are enforced in projections, propagated upwards and accumulated in the compound PHON feature, which represents phonological yields in an underspecified manner. Though limited somewhat in generative capacity, this approach covers the key phenomena that motivated linearisation grammars and offers a simpler alternative to the standard DOM-oriented theory.
In this contribution we will argue that negative polarity is a collocational phenomenon that does not follow from other properties of the respective lexical elements. With German data as evidence, we will follow a proposal by van der Wouden and treat Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) as collocates which must be licensed by abstract semantic properties of their contexts. Using a collocation module for HPSG, which has been independently motivated for bound words and idioms, we will show how to restrict the occurrence of NPIs to legitimate environments, starting from the negativity hierarchy of licensing environments by Zwarts. Besides a more fine-grained semantic licenser hierarchy, we will establish syntactic licensing domains and general collocational restrictions of NPIs.
This paper attempts to decompose the Motion event into such elements as Figure, Path, Vector, and Ground based upon Talmy's framework, which makes it possible to formally analyze and compare the lexical semantics of the deictic motion verbs within and across languages. It is shown that the difference in interpretations of the Path is attributable to the lexical specifications of both deictic motion verbs and locative phrases. It is argued that deictic motion verbs can be lexically specified for the entailment of arrival only if they express the Path eventually directed to the deictic center. A formal analysis is given based upon the HPSG framework in order to identify the elements of a Motion event contributed by each element of a verb phrase, and to determine the compositional fashion in which they are combined to give the interpretation of the verb phrase as a whole.
The Japanese language is one of the languages where universal and existential quantification are expressed using wh-words with the conjunctive and disjunctive particles, respectively. In this paper, inspired by the syntactic and semantic parallelism found in Japanese between quantification, coordination, and question, we seek to analyze these constructions in a unified fashion. We investigate various phenomena of these constructions and show how these three constructions can be uniformly analyzed as cases where abstracted arguments are questioned or quantified for verbs. We then present an HPSG formalization of the analysis.
It has often been argued that Non-Constituent Coordinations involve ellipsis. Focussing in this paper on so-called 'Argument Cluster Coordination', we provide empirical evidence drawn from French against such elliptical analyses. We then sketch an alternative approach within HPSG, allowing non-standard constituents to be conjoined in the scope of some shared predicate. While such non-standard constituents are generally obtained by relaxing phrase structure, we propose analyzing them as non-headed constructions, deriving their unusual properties from the interplay of two different sets of constraints: those imposed by coordination and those imposed by predicates that select such clusters as arguments.
Situations in which conflicting constraints clash can potentially provide linguists with insights into the architecture of grammar. This paper deals with such a case. When predicative modifiers of morphologically rich languages head relative clauses, they are involved in two, sometimes conflicting, agreement relationships. Different languages adopt different strategies in order to resolve situations of conflicting constraints. This paper focuses on Standard Arabic and the hybrid agreement strategy which it employs. It argues that the HPSG theory of agreement, which distinguishes between morphosyntactic and semantic agreement, constitutes an appropriate framework for accounting for the phenomenon. In addition, it shows that contrary to claims made by Doron and Reintges (2005), a non-derivational framework such as HPSG is adequate for accounting for this non-trivial agreement pattern. Moreover, with a constructional approach, whereby constraints can target syntactic structures above the lexical level, better empirical coverage is achieved.
The purpose of this paper is to consider the proper treatment of short- and long-fronted adjuncts within HPSG. In the earlier HPSG analyses, a rigid link between linear order and constituent structure determines the linear position of such adjuncts in the sentence-initial position. This paper will argue that there is a body of data which suggests that adjunct fronting does not work as these approaches predict. I will then show that linearisation-based HPSG can provide a fairly straightforward account of the facts.
American Sign Language (ASL) has a group of verbs showing agreement with the subject or/and object argument. There has not been analysis on especially number agreement. This paper analyzes person and number agreement within the HPSG framework. I discuss person and number hierarchy in ASL. The argument of agreement verbs can be omitted as in languages like Italian. The constraints on the type agreement-verb have the information on argument optionality.
Russian shows the mixed agreement with the polite pronoun vy and pluralia tantum nouns, both of which have plural number in form but either singular or plural number in meaning. Two different forms of adjectives – short form and long form – agree in different number with those number mismatch nominals.
I adopted the idea of Siegel (1976) etc. that when a long-form adjective appears in the predicate position, there is always a null head that it modifies, with the HPSG's agreement theory of Wechsler & Zlatic (2003). I propose that all predicates – verbs, SF and LF adjectives – except predicate nominals show CONCORD agreement. LF adjectives show CONC agreement with the null anaphor 'one'. The different number values of LF adjectives results from index agreement between the null anaphor and the subject of the sentence.
We study the formal and pragmatic properties of the 'reinforced negation construction' in Italian, which, unlike the regular negative sentence, contains both non and an n-word in preverbal position. On the one hand, this construction relies on a more general construction (positive or negative), which is pragmatically associated with reprise assertion, on the other hand, it uses non without the usual constraints attached to it. We propose that this unfaithful recycling is a pattern for creating a form dedicated to metalinguistic negation. Our analysis integrates both negative types of negative forms with their formal and pragmatic properties.
Since Pollard and Sag (1994) it has been assumed that raising involves full structure sharing, whereas a control verb merely shares the content of one of the lower verb's arguments. This has been considered a property of the phenomena, despite the fact that Pollard and Sag (1994) present this syntactic difference as a hypothesis confirmed for Icelandic only. In this paper we discuss the difference between raising and control from the perspective of Dutch and German passives. It has already been shown by Van Noord and Kordoni (2005) that the secondary object passives in these languages are raising structures, in which the case of the raised argument changes. In this paper we provide additional evidence for the raising analysis, and we propose a new analysis, which allows for a uniform account of Dutch and German passives as raising structures. Przepiorkowski and Rosen (2004) show that control may exhibit case transmission; the data presented in this paper shows that raising may not. Therefore, we claim that the distinction between raising and control is found in theta-role assignment. Syntactically they tend to behave differently, but they may also behave in the exact same way.
Several analysis of Coordination of Unlikes have been proposed within the HPSG framework. In some of these approaches the possible combinations of 'unlike categories' are encoded in the grammar, while other accounts resort to an independently motivated ellipsis analysis. In this paper we provide further arguments in favor of the latter. However, some problematic cases of Coordination of Unlikes in certain S-adjoining constructions are left unaccounted for. We propose a general analysis of these S-adjoining constructions, and in doing so, the problematic coordination cases are predicted without the need for further assumptions.
The "flexibility" of gender in Tigrinya is uncovered by (i) setting a value for gender for each noun at the lexical level (i.e. bare controllers) and (ii) analysing gender shifts as signals for evaluations (i.e. evaluated controllers). The analysis is formalized as lexical rules which change the value of gend and add an elementary predication in the rels list.
In this paper, we present an analysis of noun phrases with elided nouns that dispenses with the positing of empty categories and preserves the NP structure assumed for NPs with overt nouns, modulo the absence of the head noun. On a par with existing traceless analyses of long distance dependencies, this is proposed as a further step towards a more lean theory of grammar, without phonetically null items.
Languages often require negation to be realized in a prominent position. A well known example is Italian, which seems to require a pre-verbal realization of negation. Some other languages require negation to be in a prominent position but do not require it to be pre-verbal. An example is Swedish. Working within Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), Sells (2000) proposes that Swedish requires a negative element which is not inside VP and that Italian has the same constraint. Similar facts are found in the VSO language Welsh. However, Sellss approach cannot be applied to Welsh. Borsley and Jones (2005) develop a selectional approach to Welsh, in which certain verbs require a negative complement. This works well for Welsh but cannot be applied to Swedish or Italian. A similar approach to all three languages is possible within the linearization-based version of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) developed by Kathol (2000). It seems, then, that a linear approach is preferable to both a structural and a selectional approach.
Abstract: A functional typology of copular be in Russian allows us to systematically relate variants of predication with and without copula. The analysis sketched in this article does not need empty categories; neither does it have to stipulate categories, category changes or constituents that are not morphologically signalled. With regard to HPSG formalization, the presented approach independently motivates the use of features and mechanisms that are already available in this framework.
Comparative correlative (CC) constructions have received much attention in recent years. Major issues have been whether they involve special constructions and whether they have symmetric or asymmetric structures. Evidence from Romance suggests that they require special constructions and that they may be either symmetric or asymmetric. French has a single construction which is asymmetric for some speakers and symmetric for others. Spanish has two distinct constructions, one asymmetric and the other symmetric with quite different properties. The facts can be accommodated in a straightforward way within construction-based HPSG.
This paper discusses the NP-internal agreement strategies observed in an empirical (corpus based) study of Portuguese, and proposes an analysis which is formalized in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The empirical study suggests that what were previously thought to be rare or non-existent strategies occur with surprising frequency. Capturing these strategies poses problems for many standard approaches to agreement. The formalization shows how they can be captured with a relatively conservative extension of the existing HPSG theory of agreement.
This paper focuses on passive constructions in Dutch. Specifically, we focus on worden, as well as krijgen passives in Dutch, for which we propose a uniform, raising analysis in HPSG. We also show that such an analysis can be carried over to account for passives cross-linguistically. Specifically, we look at corresponding structures in German and show that there is no need for a dual raising and control analysis for the German "agentive" (werden) and the German "dative" (kriegen) passives, respectively, as has been proposed in Müller (2002) and Müller (2003).