Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
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Why and how to differentiate complement raising from subject raising in Dutch
Get PDFIn Dutch V-final clauses the verbs tend to form a cluster in which the main verb is separated from
its syntactic arguments by one or more other verbs. In HPSG the link between the main verb and its
arguments is canonically modeled in terms of argument inheritance, also known as argument
composition or generalized raising. When applied to Dutch, this treatment yields a
number of problems, making incorrect predictions about the interaction with the binding principles
and the passive lexical rule. To repair them this paper proposes an alternative, in which subject
raising and complement raising are modeled in terms of different devices. More specifically, while
subject raising is modeled in terms of lexical constraints, as for English, complement raising is
modeled in terms of a more general constraint on headed phrases. This new constraint not only
accounts for complement raising out of verbal complements, it also deals with complement raising out
of adjectival and adpositional complements, as well as with complement raising out of PP adjuncts
and subject NPs. It is, hence, a rather powerful device. To prevent overgeneration we add a number
of constraints. For Dutch, the relevant constraints block complement raising out of CPs, V-initial
VPs and P-initial PPs. For English, the Empty COMPS Constraint is sufficient to block complement
raising entirely
Reanalyzing German correlative es
Get PDFThe present article discusses several aspects of the
so-called correlate-es construction in German. This complex clausal
construction can be identified by a correlative nominal element es
(\u27it’) occuring in the matrix clause and a right-peripheral full clausal
argument linked to es. The article supports the hypothesis that
correlative es has a janus-faced nature between an expletive and a
referential meaning. This is the reason why existing approaches are not
sufficient to capture the properties of the discussed construction in its
entirety. The first part of the article sums up the common view on
correlative es including the empirical properties of the
construction as well as a brief survey of the relevant previous approaches
trying to account for correlative es. Based on new empirical data,
the second part of the article shows that none of these accounts is able
to capture all relevant facts of the correlate-es construction
because existing approaches usually ignore that the realization of
correlative es is verb-class dependent. Hence, a new
constraint-based analysis is developed that takes both empirical
observations into account, the verb-class dependence and the janus-faced
nature
Usage preferences: The case of the English verbal anaphor do so
Get PDFIn this paper I introduce the notion of Usage Preferences (UPs), which are statistically significant
preferences in usage which can concern any aspect of linguistics. I suggest that multiple violations
of UPs can have additive effects, causing grammatical sentences to be judged as unacceptable. A new
judgment on sentences is proposed, the downarrow (↓) to mark sentences that are taken to be
grammatical but unacceptable due to UP violations. I illustrate the idea of UPs on the basis of a
discussion of the English verbal anaphor do so, involving both a corpus analysis and two
acceptability experiments. This leads to a discussion of the relationship between grammaticality and
acceptability and to remarks on the methodological importance of taking UPs into account both in
linguistic theorizing and in the construction of acceptability experiments
Multiple case marking as case copying: A unified approach to multiple nominative and accusative constructions in Korean
Get PDFThis paper presents a unified approach to multiple nominative and accusative constructions in
Korean. We identify 16 semantic relations holding between two consecutive NPs in multiple case
marking constructions, and propose each semantic relation as a licensing condition on double case
marking. We argue that the multiple case marking constructions are merely the sequences of double
case marking, which are formed by dextrosinistrally sequencing the pairs of the same-case marked NPs
of same or different type. Some appealing consequences of this proposal include a new comprehensive
classification of the sequences of same-case NPs and a straightforward account of some long standing
problems such as how the additional same-case NPs are licensed, and in what respects the multiple
nominative marking and the multiple accusative marking are alike and different from each other
Gaps and resumptive pronouns in Modern Standard Arabic
Get PDFUnbounded dependencies in Modern Standard Arabic often involve not a gap but a null resumptive pronoun. The facts are quite complex, but it is not too difficult to extend the SLASH mechanism of HPSG to handle dependencies with a null resumptive pronoun. It is also not too difficult to restrict the distribution of gaps appropriately
Morphotactics in an information-based model of realisational morphology
Get PDFIn most recent work, Crysmann and Bonami (2012) suggest to reconcile the insights of
inferential-realisational morphology (Anderson, 1992; Stump, 2001; Brown and Hippisley, 2012) with
the full typology of variable morphotactics: situations where the expression of analogous feature
sets can appear in various positions in the string. The authors proposed to account for these facts
by importing, into HPSG, a variant of Paradigm Function Morphology (Stump, 2001) where realisation
rules are doubly indexed for linear position and paradigmatic opposition. In this paper we first
introduce more empirical challenges for theories of morphotactics that neither PFM nor the reformist
approach of Crysmann and Bonami (2012) can accommodate. We then argue for a reappraisal of methods
for morph introduction, and propose a new approach that replaces stipulation of classes of
paradigmatic opposition with a general distinction between expression and conditioning (Carstairs,
1987; Noyer, 1992) which greatly expands the scope of Pāṇini’s Principle
The syntax of distance distributivity in Polish: Preserving generalisations with weak heads
Get PDFThis paper presents a syntactic HPSG analysis of distance distributivity in Polish, where the challenge is to uniformly analyse a number of function lexemes PO \u27each\u27 which share their form and semantic contribution, but differ in their syntactic behaviour. To this end, the HPSG notion of weak head is employed in a novel way
Verbal suffix-repetition construction in Korean: A constraint- and construction-based approach
Get PDFThere are various
Verbal Suffix-Repetition (VSR) constructions in Korean, where suffixes such as -kena/tun(ci)/tun(ka) are attached to the repeated verbs. Calling the VSR Choice-denying Repeated Verbs
construction, Lee (2011) claims that the following verb of the VSR, which can be replaced with mal-,
should contain a negative but the preceding verb should be affirmative in the VSR construction which
disallows any NPI within it. Unlike Lee (2011), we claim that the verbs in the VSR can freely occur
either in the preceding position or in the following one regardless of their Neg value so long as
they share the same verbal suffix forms such as -tun(ka). Furthermore, NPIs may occur within the VSR
construction if they occur with a negative predicate within the same clause. To implement the
findings above into HPSG, we have proposed the two lexical entries for mal-, the VSR Construction
Rule, and the NPI Clause-mate Constraint. These tools enable us to account for the idiosyncratic
properties of the VSR constructions under this constraint- and construction-based approach
Arabic relativization patterns: A unified HPSG analysis
Get PDFClassical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic have several relativization patterns, including relative clauses with and without relativizers and adjectival modification patterns. Previous generative work has targeted several phenomena, but there is no analysis which covers all relativization patterns in any generative framework. We present an HPSG analysis that covers these phenomena in a uniform manner. Based on Doron and Reintges (2005), we show that the crosslinguistically unusual syntax of adjectival modifiers is a language-internally expected variant of participial modifiers as found in English. We also present the first HPSG analysis of Arabic broad subjects and argue that they are selected as specifiers, accounting for the similarities between broad subjects and ordinary subjects
Ellipsis of case-markers and information structure in Japanese
Get PDFThis paper presents an HPSG formalisation of how the ellipsis of case-marking affects the focus of
the clause in Japanese. We restrict our attention to the nominative and accusative markers ga and o,
and in view of the fact that the ellipsis effects on focushood vary between 1) ga and o and 2)
different argument structures of the head verb, develop an essentially lexicalist account that
combines both aspects, in which the implicit focus argument position is specified in the
predicate. We argue that if a constituent is an implicit focus it does not, while if one is not it
does, require a case-marker to be focused