Open Access

The paper briefly reexamines arguments for the argument–adjunct dichotomy, commonly assumed in contemporary linguistics, showing that they do not stand up to scrutiny. It demonstrates that – perhaps surprisingly – LFG currently only assumes this dichotomy in its f-structure feature geometry, and does not rely on it in any crucial way. Building on this observation, the paper presents a way of getting rid of this dichotomy altogether.

This paper shows how Walenty, a valency dictionary of Polish, was automatically converted in order to be used with an XLE/LFG grammar of Polish, discussing issues such as the grammatical function assignment under unlike category coordination and imposing constraints for lexicalised dependents.

Quantifiers canonically attach to nouns or noun phrases as modifiers to specify the amount or number of the entity expressed by the noun. However, it has been observed that quantifiers can be positioned outside of the noun phrase. These so-called floating quantifiers (FQs) exhibit intriguing syntactic and semantic characteristics. On the one hand, they appear to have a closerelationship with a noun; semantically they quantify a noun in the same way as non-floating quantifiers, and quite often they exhibit agreement with the noun. On the other hand, their phrase structure distribution is very similar to that of VP-adverbs. In this paper, we argue that the distribution of FQs is constrained not purely by syntax, but also by information structure. We show that FQs play a focus role whereas modified nouns are reference-oriented topic expressions. Building upon Dalrymple and Nikolaeva's (2011) recent proposal, we formulate the interaction between syntactic, semantic and information structure features of FQs within LFG's projection architecture.

We want to show how basic copula clauses in Indonesian can be dealt with within the framework of Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) (Pollard & Sag, 1994). We analyzed three types of basic copula clauses in Indonesian: copula clauses with noun phrase complements (NP) expressing the notions of 'proper inclusion' and 'equation', adjective phrases (AP) expressing 'attribution', and prepositional phrases (PP) expressing relationships such as 'location'. Our analysis is implemented in the Indonesian Resource Grammar (INDRA), a computational grammar for Indonesian (Moeljadi et al., 2015).

The phenomenon of so-called 'mixed' categories, whereby a word heads a phrase which appears to display some features of one lexical category, and some features of another, raises questions regarding the criteria used for distinguishing syntactic categories. In this paper I critically assess some recent work in LFG which provides 'mixed category' analyses. I show that three types of evidence are typically utilized in analyses of supposed mixed category phenomena, and I argue that two of these are not, in fact, crucial for determining category status. I show that two distinct phenomena have become conflated under the 'mixed category' heading, and argue that the term ‘mixed category’ should be reserved for only one of these.