Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
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Ergative gender agreement in Dargwa ˋˋbackward control\u27\u27 or feature sharing?
Full text linkDargwa languages have two types of agreement at clause
level: gender and person agreement. In the general case, person
agreement is hierarchical (speech act participants prefered to 3rd
persons), while gender agreement is with the absolutive (S/P)
argument. Two exceptions to this pattern have been observed in some
dialects: first, some auxiliary verbs have a gender agreement slot
which can be controlled by both ergative and absolutive arguments;
second, adverbials agreeing in gender can agree with either ergative
or absolutive if they are located at clause edges. A proposed
explanation of this behaviour is through effectively splitting each
clause into two layers, with the top layer having its own zero
absolutive position, coreferential with either the subject or the
direct object of the lower layer. In this way, the general rule that
gender agreement is with the absolutive can be preserved. In this
paper, I argue that the data of Ashti Dargwa do not support the
Backward Control theory. Peripheral adverb agreement and auxiliary
gender agreement are independent phenomena, while auxiliary agreement
can be explained by splitting the 3rd person based on topicality, as
in proximateobviative systems. This allows us to preserve the
conventional account of clause structure while framing the data of
Dargwa in a wider typological context
Aspectual object marking in Libyan Arabic
Full text linkIn Libyan Arabic, the preposition fi \u27in\u27 has
developed into a marker of continuous or habitual aspect. While
structurally remaining a preposition which marks the objects of the
non-tensed forms of dynamic transitive verbs, it serves to attribute
an aspectual interpretation to the clause as a whole. We argue that
this aspectual object marking is naturally modeled by an inside-out
functional designator, and provide arguments that the aspectual value
contributed by aspectual fi is best treated as an f-structure
feature
The syntax-prosody interface in Korean: Resolving ambiguity in questions
Full text linkThe paper
considers a phenomenon in Korean where ambiguity in the written
language is resolved prosodically. An LFG analysis is provided which
extends the proposals of Mycock and Lowe (2013) to Korean, based on
experimental evidence on the prosodic expression of focus in Korean
which challenges the phrase-boundary based account of Jun and Oh
(1996), and suggests that considering expanded pitch range may give a
more robust account of focus expression
Refining the semantics of lexical rules in HPSG
Full text linkThis paper points out
certain flaws in the semantics for lexical rule specifications
developed in Meurers (2001). Under certain circumstances, certain
words may not be licit inputs to a rule according to this semantics
while one would expect them to be from inspecting the specification of
the rule. The reasons for this are shown to be that whether properties
of paths should be transferred from the input of a rule to its output
is decided considering only the respective paths and their properties
in isolation, ignoring the ‘non-local’ effects that transferring their
properties can have. Furthermore, the semantics is insensitive to the
possible shapes of inputs to the rule, which also makes it possible
that inputs of certain shapes are unexpectedly not accepted. An
alternative semantics is developed that does not suffer from these
deficits
Syntactic, semantic and information structures of floating quantifiers
Full text linkQuantifiers 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
Switched control and other ˋˋuncontrolled\u27\u27 cases of obligatory control
Full text linkThe
paper presents an analysis of control switch in German and Norwegian,
as exemplified in the German pair Ich verspreche ihm zu kommen \u27I
promise him to come\u27 vs. Ich verspreche ihm kommen zu dürfen \u27I
promise him to be allowed to come\u27. The phenomenon is induced by
deontic modals in the context of suasive verbs of communication. The
analysis is cast both in LFG and HPSG framework, in both cases
deploying a pronounced feature-based semantic component. Our core
assumption is that a normative agent is computed on top of control
relations
Preliminary results from the Free Linguistic Environment project
Full text linkThe Free Linguistic Environment (FLE) project focuses on the
development of an open and free library of natural language processing
functions and a grammar engineering platform for Lexical Functional
Grammar (LFG) and related grammar frameworks. In its present state the
code-base of FLE contains basic essential elements for LFG-parsing. It
uses finite-state-based morphological analyzers and syntactic
unification parsers to generate parse-trees and related functional
representations for input sentences based on a grammar. It can
process a variety of grammar formalisms, which can be used
independently or serve as backbones for the LFG parser. Among the
supported formalisms are Context-free Grammars (CFG), Probabilistic
Contextfree Grammars (PCFG), and all formal grammar components of the
XLEgrammar formalism. The current implementation of the LFG-parser
includes the possibility to use a PCFG backbone to model probabilistic
c-structures. It also includes f-structure representations that allow
for the specification or calculation of probabilities for complete
f-structure representations, as well as for sub-paths in f-structure
trees. Given these design features, FLE enables various forms of
probabilistic modeling of c-structures and f-structures for input or
output sentences that go beyond the capabilities of other technologies
based on the LFG framework
Verbal present participles in Norwegian: Controlled complements or parts of complex predicates
Full text linkNorwegian has a limited option for verbal
present participles. These participles only exist with a small number
of verbs, and they are selected by a handful of predicates. The
analysis of sentences with these participles raises some
challenges. Taking the analysis of Thurén (2008) as my point of
departure, I argue that verbal present participles have two possible
analyses, as controlled complements, or as parts of complex
predicates. The presentational focus construction gives important
evidence for this analysis
Quirky subjects in Icelandic, Faroese, and German: A Relational Grammar account
Full text linkThis paper presents a new analysis of quirky subjects according to
which quirky subjects bear multiple grammatical relations and hence
differ syntactically from regular subjects. This contrasts with the
standard analysis of quirky subjects according to which quirky
subjects are regular subjects bearing lexical case and therefore
differ only morphologically from regular subjects. Based on the
behavior of quirky subjects in Faroese and German, I argue that the
syntactic account is superior. Faroese shows that the case borne by a
quirky subject is not lexical, whereas German shows that quirky
subjects are not regular subjects to begin with. The behavior of
quirky subjects in Icelandic, on which the standard analysis is based,
is argued to be the result of a morphosyntactic peculiarity of
Icelandic
How not to distinguish arguments from adjuncts in LFG
Full text linkThe 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