Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
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Coherence with adjectives in German
Get PDFCoherence generally refers to a kind of predicate formation
where a verb forms a complex predicate with the head of its
infinitival complement. Adjectives taking infinitival complements have
also been shown to allow coherence, but the exact conditions for
coherence with adjectives appear not to have been addressed in the
literature. Based on a corpus-study (supplemented with
grammaticality judgements by native speakers) we show that adjectives
fall into three semantically and syntactically defined classes
correlating with their ability to construct coherently. Non-factive and
non-gradable adjectives allow coherence, factive and gradable adjectives
do not allow coherence and non-factive and gradable adjectives are
tolerated with coherence. On the basis of previous work on coherence in
German we argue that coherence allows the infinitival complement of a
verb or an adjective to be "split-up", so that the head and a dependent of this head
are associated with different information structural functions. In
this respect coherence patterns with extraction structures where the
extracted constituent has an information structural function different
from the constituent from which it is extracted. Following
literature on the information structural basis of extraction islands,
we show how the lack of coherence with factive adjectives follows from
their complements\u27 being information structurally backgrounded, while the infinitival
complements of non-factive adjectives tend to a higher fusion with the
matrix clause. We also show that coherence is observed with
attributive adjectives as well, arguing that coherence is not a distinct
verbal property. Finally we provide an analysis of
coherence with adjectives within HPSG
Korean comparative constructions: A constraint-based approach and computational implementation
Get PDFThe complexity of comparative constructions in each language has given challenges to both
theoretical and computational analyses. This paper first identifies types of comparative
constructions in Korean and discusses their main grammatical properties. It then builds a syntactic
parser couched upon the typed feature structure grammar, HPSG and proposes a context-dependent
interpretation for the comparison. To check the feasibility of the proposed analysis, we have
implemented the grammar into the existing Korean Resource Grammar. The results show us that the
grammar we have developed here is feasible enough to parse Korean comparative sentences and yield
proper semantic representations though further development is needed for a finer model for
contextual information
Analysing speech and co-speech gesture in constraint-based grammars
Get PDFThis paper addresses the form-meaning relation of multimodal communicative actions by means of a
grammar that combines verbal input with hand gestures. Unlike speech, gesture signals are
interpretable only through their semantic relation to the synchronous speech content. This relation
serves to resolve the incomplete meaning that is revealed by gestural form alone. We demonstrate
that by using standard linguistic methods, speech and gesture can be integrated in a constrained way
into a single derivation tree which maps to a uniform meaning representation
Usage-based preferences in written sentence production: The role of local and global statistics
Get PDFIn this paper, we will discuss the role of different levels of frequency distributions in sentence
processing and in written production, looking at French homophones. A comparison of experimental
data and corpus statistics will demonstrate that lexical frequencies as well as local and global
coherences have to be taken into account to fully explain the empirically established patterns
Discontinuous negation in Hausa
Get PDFInvestigating the morphological and syntactic properties of discontinuous negative marking in Hausa,
I shall suggest a constructional approach involving edge inflection, accounting simultaneously for
the morphologically bound nature of the initial marker and its interaction with the TAM system,
haplology of the final marker, and wide scope over coordination. I will argue that the degree of
morphological integration of initial markers and haplology of final markers both favour an edge
feature approach over phrasal affixation
An HPSG approach to Welsh unbounded dependencies
Get PDFWelsh is a language in which unbounded dependency constructions involve both gaps and resumptive
pronouns (RPs). Gaps and RPs appear in disjoint sets of environments. Otherwise, however, they are
quite similar. This suggests that they involve the same mechanism, and in HPSG that they involve the
SLASH feature. It is possible to provide an analysis in which RPs are associated with the SLASH
feature but are also the ordinary pronouns which they appear to be
Classic problems at the syntax-morphology interface: Whose are they?
Get PDFThere are fascinating problems at the syntax-morphology interface which tend to be missed. I offer a
brief explanation of why that may be happening, then give a Canonical Typology perspective, which
brings these problems to the fore. I give examples showing that the phenomena could in principle be
treated either by syntactic rules (but these would be complex) or within morphology (but this would
involve redundancy). Thus ˋnon-autonomous\u27 case values, those which have no unique form but are
realized by patterns of syncretism, could be handled by a rule of syntax (one with access to other
features, such as number) or by morphology (with resulting systematic syncretisms). I concentrate on
one of the most striking sets of data, the issue of prepositional government in Latvian, and outline
a solution within Network Morphology using structured case values
Verb inflection in Chiquihuitlán Mazatec: A fragment and a PFM approach
Get PDFMazatec is an Eastern Otomanguean language spoken by about 200,000 people, located in the
northeastern part of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. The present paper aims to shed new light on
Mazatec verb inflection within the framework of current research on Otomanguean phonology and
morphology. We intend to show that, despite bewildering apparent complexity, mainly due to extensive
morphophonological processes, Mazatec inflectional morphology is in fact rather simple and
regular. Realizational approaches, in particular Paradigm Function Morphology (PFM) seem especially
adequate to capture such regularities
Auxiliary-stranding relative clauses
Get PDFA little discussed feature of English are non-restrictive relative clauses in which the antecedent
is normally not an NP and the gap follows an auxiliary, as in Kim will sing, which Lee won\u27t. These
relative clauses resemble clauses with auxiliary complement ellipsis or fronting. There are a
variety of analyses that might be proposed, but there are reasons for thinking that the best
analysis is one where which is a nominal filler associated with a gap which is generally
non-nominal: a filler-gap mismatch analysis in other words
The family of English cognate object constructions
Get PDFIn the Cognate Object Construction (COC) a typically intransitive verb
combines with a postverbal noun phrase whose head noun is morphologically
or semantically cognate to the verb. I will argue that English has a
family of COCs which consists of four different types. The COCs
share common core properties but differ with respect to some of their
syntactic and semantic properties. I will capture the ˋˋcognateness\u27\u27
between the verb and the noun in all COCs by token identities at the level
of their lexical semantic contribution. I will use an inheritance
hierarchy on lexical rule sorts to model the family relations among the
different COC types