Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
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Subject inversion in French: The limits of information structure
Get PDFMy objective here is to assess the relevance of information structural notions for analyzing subject
inversion in French. Subject inversion is not a unified phenomenon. In fact, there are three distinct
constructions featuring an inverted subject. I show that the sentences do not have the same informational
potential (the type of focus-ground articulation they are compatible with) depending on the construction
they abide by. I propose a contextual factor – the informational solidarity between the verb and its first
argument – to account for those differences. Then, I show that the three constructions share a common
feature that pertains to a completely different dimension: the perspective chosen to describe the situation. I
adopt Langacker\u27s notion of absolute construal to characterize it. Finally, I present another common
feature: the blocking of the referential anchoring of the referent of indefinite and partitive NPs
An HPSG approach to synchronous speech and deixis
Get PDFThe use of hand gestures to point at objects and individuals, or to navigate through landmarks on a
virtually created map is ubiquitous in face-to-face conversation. We take this observation as a
starting point, and we demonstrate that deictic gestures can be analysed on a par with speech by
using standard methods from constraint-based grammars such as HPSG. In particular, we use the form
of the deictic signal, the form of the speech signal (including its prosodic marking) and their
relative temporal performance to derive an integrated multimodal tree that maps to an integrated
multimodal meaning. The integration process is constrained via construction rules that rule out
ill-formed input. These rules are driven from an empirical corporal study which sheds light on the
interaction between speech and deictic gesture
Null conjuncts and bound pronouns in Arabic
Get PDFThis paper presents a descriptive overview and a formal analysis of the
syntax of pronominal arguments, pronominal conjuncts and bound pronouns
in Arabic. I argue that Arabic allows first conjuncts to be null and that this
is an instance of a more general pattern of zero anaphora that may affect
pronominal arguments or their first conjuncts. First Conjunct Agreement
and constraints on the distribution of zero anaphora are accounted for by a
new feature sharing mechanism which allows a uniform treatment without
appeal to the internal structure of argument NPs. I then argue that Arabic
bound pronouns should be analyzed as affixes and present an analysis of
their relation to argument structure and coordination. Finally, it is shown how
constraints on case marking in Arabic coordination can be formalized. The
analysis is part of an Arabic grammar fragment implemented in the TRALE
system
Positional expletives in Danish, German, and Yiddish
Get PDFThis paper deals with expletives that are inserted into clauses for structural reasons. We will
focus on the Germanic languages Danish, German, and Yiddish. In Danish and Yiddish expletives are
inserted in preverbal position in certain wh-clauses: In Danish such an insertion is
observed when the subject is locally extracted from an SVO configuration in non-assertive
clauses. In Yiddish wh-clauses are formed from a wh-phrase and a V2 clause. If no
element would be fronted in the embedded V2 clause, an expletive is inserted in non-assertive
clauses in order to meet the V3 requirement for embedded clauses. In
addition to embedded wh-clauses,
declarative V2 clauses also allow the insertion of an expletive. In Danish the expletive fills the
subject position and is not necessarily fronted. In German and Yiddish the expletive has to occur in
fronted position. In contrast to Danish and Yiddish, German does not
insert expletives into embedded wh-clauses. They are
inserted only into declarative V2 clauses in order to fulfill the V2 requirement without having to
front another constituent. In this paper we try to provide an account that captures the
commonalities between the three languages while being able to account for the differences
Case suffixes and postpositions in Hungarian
Get PDFThis paper examines the morpho-syntactic puzzle of case suffixes and postpositions that Hungarian
displays. Although these two categories show distributional similarities, they are distinguishable
from a morphological and a syntactic point of view. Moreover, this language has defective
postpositions which are in complementary distribution with case suffixes. I argue that there is no
real argument for lumping case suffixes together with postpositions into the same syntactic
category, as has been suggested in recent linguistics studies (Trommer, 2008; Asbury, 2007). I
rather propose to treat case suffixes and postpositions as two different objects: case suffixes are
inflectional material on nominal heads and postpositions as well as defective postpositions are
independent words subcategorizing an NP. This distinction straightforwardly accounts for
morphological and syntactic differences. Finally, the shared distributional properties between case
suffixes, postpositions and defective postpositions are captured by means of the use of the MARKING
feature
Focus particles, secondary meanings, and Lexical Resource Semantics: The case of Japanese shika
Get PDFJapanese has two exclusive particles ˋshika\u27 and ˋdake\u27. Although traditionally, both particles were
considered to be exclusive particles like ˋonly\u27, a recent proposal claims that ˋshika\u27 is an
exceptive particle like ˋeveryone except\u27 to account for the necessary co-occurrence of the negative
suffix ˋna\u27 and ˋshika\u27. We show that this negative suffix lacks two critical semantic properties of
ordinary logical negation: It is not downward entailing, nor does it license negative polarity
items. We show that both ˋshika\u27 and ˋdake\u27 are exclusive particles, but that ˋshika\u27 encodes an
additional secondary meaning. The negative suffix only contributes to the sentence\u27s secondary
meaning when it co-occurs with ˋshika\u27. We present an HPSG and LRS analysis that models the
co-occurrence of ˋshika\u27 and the negative suffix ˋna\u27, and their contribution to the sentence\u27s
secondary meaning
Morphology in the ˋˋwrong\u27\u27 place: The curious case of Coast Tsimshian connectives
Get PDFThis paper examines the apparently odd location of case-marking
formatives found in the Pacific Northwest language, Coast Tsimshian.
It first argues that the case-marking formatives are actually affixes
on the preceding words, not prosodically-dependent words. Given this
morphological analysis, a syntactic analysis is proposed that utilizes
the \u27informationally-rich\u27 syntactic structure of HPSG. In
particular, the analysis proposed uses EDGE features and chained
identities between adjacent phrasal sisters to license the clause.
This enables a simple analysis of the clausal syntax of Coast
Tsimshian while still accounting for the wide array of facts
surrounding the connectives
Converting CCGs into typed feature structure grammars
Get PDFIn this paper, we report on a transformation scheme that turns a Categorial
Grammar, more specifically, a Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG; see
Baldridge, 2002) into a derivation- and meaning-preserving typed feature
structure (TFS) grammar.
We describe the main idea which can be traced back at least to work by
Karttunen (1986), Uszkoreit (1986), Bouma (1988), and Calder et al. (1988).
We then show how a typed representation of complex categories can be extended
by other constraints, such as modes, and indicate how the Lambda semantics of
combinators is mapped into a TFS representation, using unification to perform
perform alpha-conversion and beta-reduction (Barendregt, 1984).
We also present first findings concerning runtime measurements, showing
that the PET system, originally developed for the HPSG grammar framework,
outperforms the OpenCCG parser by a factor of 8–10 in the time domain and a
factor of 4–5 in the space domain
Reanalysis of semantically required dependents as complements in the Chinese ba-construction
Get PDFThe paper aims at a formulation of semantic constraints on the produc-
tivity of the Chinese ba-construction and their representation at the
syntax-semantics interface. It builds on the observation that requirements
on the surface form of the construction may be altered by the choice of
the verb. I propose that the semantics of the ba-construction can be
treated in terms of a scalar constraint: a ba-sentence must come with a
scale and a difference value that holds of the described event. The
satisfaction of this constraint largely relies on the lexical semantics of
the sentence. Not all verbs are inherently associated with scalar
relations; those that are not must combine with an additional dependent
which satisfies the scale requirement. Due to the obligatory presence of
the additional dependent for some verbs, it is reanalyzed as a complement
of ba: being optional on their level of combination with the verb, it
becomes obligatory once the verb is used in the ba-construction
Remarks on sluicing
Get PDFSluicing is widely regarded as requiring an analysis via deletion
operations, a potentially problematic conclusion for
non-transformational frameworks like HPSG. We examine critically and
reassess the motivation for a deletion analysis of Sluicing, offering
cross-linguistic and language-internal evidence in support of a
fundamentally semantic constructional alternative like the
one proposed by Ginzburg and Sag (2000)