The 10 most recently published documents
Middle Welsh is a VSO language with the verb before the subject in all kinds of finite clause. However, positive declarative main clauses normally show verb-second order with a constituent of some kind before the finite verb. There are questions about the nature of this restriction. There are also questions about subject-initial sentences, which show surprising agreement properties, whether the subject is a topic or a focused constituent. All these questions can be given plausible answers within HPSG.
We present an analysis of multiple question fronting in a restricted variant of the HPSG formalism (DELPH-IN) where unification is the only natively defined operation. Analysing multiple fronting in this formalism is challenging, because it requires carefully handling list appends, something that HPSG analyses of question fronting heavily rely on. Our analysis uses the append list type to address this challenge. We focus the testing of our analysis on Russian, although we also integrate it into the Grammar Matrix customization system where it serves as a basis for cross-linguistic modeling. In this context, we discuss the relationship of our analysis to lexical threading and conclude that, while lexical threading has its advantages, modeling multiple extraction cross-linguistically is easier without the lexical threading assumption.
The Smurf comics series is, among others, famous for the so-called "smurf language", in which words or parts of words can be replaced by "smurf". We will argue that this "smurfing" has the properties of placeholding. Based on data from German translations of Smurf comics, we will provide a formalization of smurfing in German which can be generalized to a theory of placeholder expressions.
This paper sketches an analysis in Lexical Resource Semantics of adverbial and adjectival modification in nominal projections which is extensible to modification of other syntactic categories. It combines insights into the syntax-semantics interface of recursive modification in HPSG with underspecified semantics and type-logical meaning representations in the tradition of Montague grammar. The analysis is phrased in such a way that it receives a direct implementation in the Constraint Language of Lexical Resource Semantics as part of the TRALE system.
The indigenous languages of North America have played a critical role in discussions of the universality of part-of-speech distinctions. In this paper, we show that Oneida does not include a grammatical distinction between nouns and verbs. Rather, Oneida inflecting lexical items are subject to two cross-cutting semantic classifications, one that concerns the sort of entities they describe, the other the sort of semantic relation they include in their content. Labels such as ‘noun' and ‘verb' can still be used for cross-linguistic comparison, as the semantic partition of lexical items corresponds to canonical nouns and verbs according to morphologists and some typologists. But the meta-grammatical status of these labels is quite distinct from the status of corresponding labels in Indo-European languages like English.
This paper presents an incremental approach to verb clusters in German which radically differs from standard HPSG accounts. While the common assumption is that the verbs in subordinate clauses form clusters and accumulate all their valence requirements on a SUBCAT list, the assumption in this paper is that the arguments in verb final clauses are encapsulated incrementally into syntactic and semantic structures before the verbs are attached. The proposed analysis is in line with psycholinguistic findings. A grammar fragment of German demonstrating an implementation of the analysis is presented.
This paper proposes an account for the four auxiliaries in Kazakh that express the imperfective aspect. The main factors – the auxiliary, the main verb, their inflections and the aspectual specifications reveal a complicated system, which can be captured with an appropriate monotonic, multiple inheritance type hierarchy using online-type construction with the implementation of Pāṇinian competition. This analysis sheds light to a very different auxiliary system that we find in Indo-European languages.
Unrealized arguments in SBCG
(2020)
In null instantiation (NI) an optionally unexpressed argument receives either anaphoric or existential interpretation (Fillmore, 1986; Mauner & Koenig, 2000; Kay, 2002; Ruppenhofer & Michaelis, 2010, 2014). Examples include Lexically licensed NI (Nixon resigned.), Contextual accessibility NI (Can I see?), Labelese (Contains alcohol), Diary NI (Got up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head), Generic-habitual NI (The police only arrest (people) when there's probable cause). We think of a predicator as having NI potential when one or more of its frame elements may remain unexpressed under certain conditions. While one cannot accurately predict a predicator's NI potential based either on semantic factors (e.g., Aktionsart class of the verb, as in Hovav & Levin (1998)) or pragmatic factors (e.g., relative discourse prominence of arguments, as in Goldberg (2006)), NI potential, while highly constrained, is not simply lexical idiosyncrasy, but is instead the product of both lexical and constructional licensing. In the latter case, a construction can endow a verb with NI potential that it would not otherwise have. Using representational tools of Sign Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2012, a.o), we offer a lexical treatment of null instantiation that covers both distinct patterns of construal of null instantiated arguments and the difference between listeme-based and contextually licensed, thus construction-based, null complementation
Research on unbounded dependency constructions (UDCs) has focused mainly on the properties that are shared by all UDCs, but a satisfactory theory of syntax also needs to capture the properties that distinguish specific UDCs and the properties that are shared by some but not all of them. Three Welsh unbounded dependency constructions – wh-interrogatives, free relatives, and cleft sentences – are of interest here because they show a challenging array of similarities and the differences. However, given a slightly expanded hierarchy of phrase types, HPSG can capture both the similarities and the differences in this area.
