Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
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Two cases of prominent internal possessor constructions
Full text linkThis paper outlines a new analysis of
the syntactic structure and discourse function of a ‘prominent
internal possessor construction’ (PIPC) in Chimane (unclassified,
Bolivia) and compares it with an existing analysis of a different kind
of PIPC found in Maithili (Indo- Aryan, India/Nepal). PIPCs in Chimane
and Maithili involve an apparently non-local agreement relation
between verbs and possessors which are internal to possessive NPs. In
Chimane, it is argued that internal possessors are able to control
object agreement via a clause-level ‘proxy’ of the internal possessor
– see also Ritchie (under review). The paper goes on to compare this
construction with PIPCs in Maithili, and shows that speakers use PIPCs
in discourse to indicate the information structure role of the
internal possessor. In the case of Chimane, it seems that internal
possessors which bear the secondary topic role are more likely to
control object agreement, while in Maithili, other semantic and
information structural features of internal possessors are at
play. The contributions of the various levels of sentence structure
are modelled using the LFG architecture developed in Dalrymple &
Nikolaeva (2005; 2011)
Reducing grammatical functions in LFG
Full text linkThe aim of this paper is to reexamine the rich repertoire of
grammatical functions assumed in LFG and provide novel arguments for
the claim, voiced earlier for example in Alsina et al. 2005, that most
of them are redundant. We also demonstrate that a textbook LFG test
for the sameness of grammatical functions of different predicates
fails on closer scrutiny. Constructively, we propose a more
constrained approach to grammatical functions, which, however, has the
advantage of formalising the grammatical function hierarchy, assumed
in LFG analyses of diverse phenomena but apparently not previously
formalised
Categorematic unreducible polyadic quantifiers in Lexical Resource Semantics
Full text linkEarly work on quantification in natural languages showed that
sentences like ˋEvery ape picked different berries\u27, on the reading
that the sets of berries picked by any two apes are not the same, can
be logically represented with a single polyadic quantifier for the
two nominal phrases. However, since that quantifier cannot be
decomposed into two quantifiers for the two nominal phrases, a
compositional semantic analysis of this reading is not possible
under standard assumptions about syntax and semantics. This paper
shows how a constraint-based semantics with Lexical Resource
Semantics can define a systematic syntax-semantics interface which
captures the reading in question with a polyadic quantifier
Development of maximally reusable grammars: Parallel development of Hebrew and Arabic grammars
Full text linkWe show how linguistic grammars of two different yet related languages can be developed and implemented in parallel, with language-independent fragments serving as shared resources, and language-specific ones defined separately for each language. The two grammars in the focus of this paper are of Modern Hebrew and Modern Standard Arabic, and the basic infrastructure, or core, of the grammars is based on "standard" HPSG. We identify four types of relations that exist between the grammars of two languages and demonstrate how the different types of relations can be implemented in parallel grammars with maximally shared resources. The examples pertain to the grammars of Modern Hebrew and Modern Standard Arabic, yet similar issues and considerations are applicable to other pairs of languages that have some degree of similarity
Hebrew verbal multi-word expressions
Full text linkMulti-word expressions (MWEs) are challenging for grammatical theories and grammar development since they blur the traditional distinction between the lexicon and the grammar, and vary in the degree of idiosyncrasy with respect to their semantic, syntactic, and morphological behavior. Nevertheless, the need to incorporate MWEs into grammars is unquestionable, especially in light of estimates claiming that MWEs account for approximately half of the entries in the lexicon. In this study we focus on verbal MWEs in Modern Hebrew: we consider different types of this class of MWEs, and propose an analysis in the framework of HPSG. Moreover, we incorporate this analysis into HeGram, a deep linguistic processing grammar of Modern Hebrew
Building Zhong, a Chinese HPSG shared-grammar
Full text linkThis paper describes some of our attempts in extending Zhong, a Chinese HPSG shared-grammar. New analyses for two Chinese specific phenomena, reduplication and the SUO-DE structure, are introduced. The analysis of reduplication uses lexical rules to capture both the syntactic and semantic properties (amplification in adjectives and diminishing in verbs). Words showing non-productive reduplication are entered in the lexicon, and the semantic relations will be captured in an external resource (the Chinese Open Wordnet). The SUO-DE structure constrains the meanings of relative clauses to a gapped-object interpretation
ˋˋAgreement mismatch\u27\u27 between sort/kind/type and the determiner
No full textA singular countable noun
in English normally needs a determiner and they should agree in number. However, there is a type of noun phrase, such as ‘these sort of skills’, which
does not conform to this generalisation. As a singular countable common noun, the noun ‘sort’ requires a determiner, but there is an agreement mismat
ch here: ‘sort’ is singular but the determiner is plural. Rather, the determiner agrees with the NP after the preposition ‘of’. There are several po
ssible analyses that might be proposed, but the best analysis is the one in which ‘sort’ and the preposition ‘of’ are ‘functors’, non-heads selecting heads
A constraint-based analysis of A-NOT-A questions in Mandarin Chinese
Full text linkThe A-NOT-A structure is one way to express polar questions in Mandarin Chinese. The present study provides a constraint-based analysis of A-NOT-A questions in Mandarin Chinese within the framework of HPSG (Pollard & Sag, 1994) and MRS (Copestake et al., 2005). We propose two possible approaches to analysing the A-NOT-A structure — a morphological/lexical approach as well as a syntactic approach — and illustrate their implementation, as well as their respective strengths and weaknesses
Feeling our way to an analysis of English possessed idioms
Full text linkThis paper describes an analysis for possessive idioms in English (e.g. ˋI twiddle my thumbs\u27 ˋˋI am idle\u27\u27). The analysis relies on matching at the semantic level, to allow for syntactic variation. It has been implemented in the English Resource Grammar, and tested by parsing a subset of the British National Corpus. In addition to the syntactic analysis, we have linked the idioms to entries in the Princeton Wordnet, to allow for further lexical semantic analysis
An analysis of simple and construct-state noun phrases in Modern Standard Arabic
Full text linkThis paper aims to propose an HPSG analysis for simple and construct-state noun phrases in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). To the best of my knowledge, there are no major HPSG analyses of MSA noun phrases (NPs). A parallel phenomenon in Hebrew has been discussed quite extensively in the same framework by Wintner (2000). Most of the discussion will be devoted for the construct-state noun phrase in which the order of the elements within it is NP AP PP. Three different analyses will be outlined within the HPSG framework: the extra complement analysis, the special complement analysis, and the head-adjunct-complement analysis. These analyses will be evaluated and it will be concluded that the last analysis seems to be the best and the most promising approach to Arabic NPs