Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
Not a member yet
468 research outputs found
Sort by
Floating numeral classifiers in Korean: A thematic-structure perspective
Get PDFThe syntactic and semantic complexity of the so-called numeral classifier
(NUM-CL) constructions in languages like Korean (Japanese and Chinese as
well) has much challenged theoretical as well as computational approaches.
Among several types of the NUM-CL constructions, the most complicated
type includes the so-called FQ (floated numeral classifier/quantifier) construction
where the NUM-CL ˋfloats\u27 away from its antecedent. This paper,
couched upon the non-derivational VP-modifier view, shows that in addition
to the grammatical function of the host NP and types of the main predicate,
properties of the intervening expression between the FQ and its host NP also
play an important role in licensing the FQ\u27s distribution. In particular, we
show that the FQ introduces new information in discourse and as default sets
off rheme in the thematic structure. This functional analysis can provide an
answer to several puzzling contrasts we observe in the distribution of the FQ
Integrating GIVENness into a structured meaning approach in HPSG
Get PDFIn this article we show how the HPSG approach to information structure of De Kuthy (2002) and De Kuthy and Meurers (2003)
can be extended to capture givenness (Schwarzschild, 1999) and make the right predictions for so-called deaccenting of given information,
a widespread phenomenon not previously dealt with in HPSG
The information structure of subject extraposition in Early New High German
Get PDFThis paper investigates the information-structural characteristics of extraposed subjects in Early
New High German (ENHG). Based on new quantitative data from a parsed corpus of ENHG, I will argue
that unlike objects, subjects in ENHG have two motivations for extraposing. First, subjects may
extrapose in order to receive narrow focus, which is the pattern Bies (1996) has shown for object
extraposition in ENHG. Secondly, however, subjects may extrapose in order to receive a default
sentence accent, which is most visible in the case of presentational constructions. This motivation
does not affect objects, which may achieve the same prosodic goal without having to extrapose. The
study has two major consequences: (1) subject extraposition in ENHG demonstrates that there is not
necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between syntactic structure and information structural
effect (cf. Féry 2007); and (2) the overall phenomenon of DP extraposition in ENHG fits into a
broader set of crosslinguistic focus phenomena which demonstrate a subject-object asymmetry
(cf. Hartmann and Zimmermann 2007, Skopeteas and Fanselow 2010), raising important questions about
the relationship between argument structure and information structural notions
Information structure as parallel tree building
Get PDFThis paper presents a Synchronous Tree Adjoining Grammar (STAG) account of Information Structure,
whereby Givenness-marking requires a link between nodes on a syntactic tree and LF nodes whose
interpretation is supplied by a contextually determined set of Given semantic objects. By
hypothesis, the interpretation of linked nodes bypasses a default interpretation principle that
requires pragmatic reasoning to disambiguate elements and enrich semantic material. Thus,
interpreting Given elements requires less cognitive effort than Focused elements. This, combined
with some established insights from Game-theoretic pragmatics, yields empirical advantages over
more traditional semantic/pragmatic analyses of equal simplicity
German multiple fronting and expected topic-hood
Get PDFThis papers addresses information-structural restrictions on the occurrence of what is known as
"multiple fronting" in German. Multiple fronting involves the realization of (what appears to be)
more than one constituent in the first position of main clause declaratives, a clause type that
otherwise respects the verb-second constraint of German. Relying on a large body of naturally
occurring instances of multiple fronting with the surrounding discourse context, we show that in
certain contexts, multiple fronting is fully grammatical in German, in contrast to what has
sometimes been claimed previously. Examination of this data reveals two different patterns, which we
analyze in terms of two distinct constructions, each instantiating a specific pairing of form,
meaning and contextual appropriateness
Hindi noun inflection and Distributed Morphology
Get PDFThis paper primarily presents an analysis of nominal inflection in Hindi within the framework of
Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993, 1994 and Harley and Noyer 1999). Müller (2002, 2003,
2004) for German, Icelandic and Russian nouns respectively and Weisser (2006) for Croatian nouns
have also used Distributed Morphology (henceforth DM) to analyze nominal inflectional morphology.
This paper will discuss in detail the inflectional categories and inflectional classes, the
morphological processes operating at syntax, the distribution of vocabulary items and the
readjustment rules required to describe Hindi nominal inflection. Earlier studies on Hindi
inflectional morphology (Guru 1920, Vajpeyi 1958, Upreti 1964, etc.) were greatly influenced by the
Paninian tradition (classical Sanskrit model) and work with Paninian constructs such as root and
stem. They only provide descriptive studies of Hindi nouns and verbs and their inflections without
discussing the role or status of affixes that take part in inflection. The discussion on the
mechanisms (morphological operations and rules) used to analyze or generate word forms are missing
in these studies. In addition, these studies do not account for syntax-morphology or
morphology-phonology mismatches that show up in word formation. One aim of this paper is to present
an economical way of forming noun classes in Hindi as compared to other traditional methods,
especially gender and stem ending based or paradigm based methods that give rise to a large number
of inflectional paradigms. Using inflectional class information to analyse the various forms of
Hindi nouns, we can reduce the number of affixes and word-generation and readjustment rules that are
required to describe nominal inflection. The analysis also helps us in developing a morphological
analyzer for Hindi. The small set of rules and fewer inflectional classes are of great help to
lexicographers and system developers. To the best of our knowledge, the analysis of Hindi
inflectional morphology based on DM and its implementation in a Hindi morphological analyzer has not
been done before. The methods discussed here can be applied to other Indian languages for analysis
as well as word generation
Arabic nominals in HPSG: A verbal noun perspective
Get PDFSemitic languages exhibit rich nonconcatenative morphological operations, which can generate a myriad of
derived lexemes. Especially, the feature rich, root-driven morphology in the Arabic language demonstrates the
construction of several verb-derived nominals (verbal nouns) such as gerunds, active participles, passive
participles, locative participles, etc. Although HPSG is a successful syntactic theory, it lacks the
representation of complex nonconcatenative morphology. In this paper, we propose a novel HPSG representation for
Arabic nominals and various verb-derived nouns. We also present the lexical type hierarchy and derivational rules
for generating these verb-derived nominals using the HPSG framework
Persian object clitics and the syntax-morphology interface
Get PDFThis paper presents a descriptive overview and formal analysis of the use of pronominal clitics for
realizing various types of arguments in Persian, with particular emphasis on object clitics in the
verbal domain. We argue that pronominal clitics behave more like suffixes than independent syntactic
elements; in cases where they take syntactic scope over an NP or a PP, they must be phrasal
affixes. We propose an HPSG analysis to account for the morphosyntactic aspects of verbal
suffixation of object clitics, possessive clitics, preverbal object clitics, and clitic doubling
constructions. Finally, we explore extensions of the analysis to periphrastic verb forms, and we
compare our proposals for Persian to previous HPSG work on clitic phenomena in other languages
How many conversions from verb to noun are there in French?
Get PDFIn this paper, I discuss verb to noun conversion in French. The properties of
the input verb and the output noun are presented and a formal representation is
proposed using the SBCG framework. The use of such a formalism based on
constraints and multiple inheritance highlights the difficulties in defining
what exactly is a conversion rule. I propose that the different properties of
the input verb and the output noun can be thought of as different dimensions of
classification, which characterize the verb to noun conversion rule
On the syntax and semantics of vice versa
Get PDFThis work focuses on the syntax and semantics of the expression vice
versa, and shows that its syntactic distribution is much more flexible than
semantically related expressions. Although vice versa usually appears in
clausal coordinate environments, it can in principle occur in any other type
of construction. Second, it can occur as an embedded verb phrase or even
as a noun phrase, rather than as an adjunct. This suggests that vice versa
is a propositional anaphor that corresponds to a converse of a propositional
antecedent. Finally, although the predicates singled out to be interchanged
are usually nominal, they can in fact be of virtually any part of speech. I
argue that a possible account of the interpretation of vice versa lies at the
interface between logical form (with rich decompositional lexical semantics
along the lines of Pustejovsky (1995)), and pragmatics (drawing from independent
work by Hobbs (1990) and Kehler (2002))