Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
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On the copula: From a Fregean to a Montagovian treatment
Get PDFThe analysis of the copula as a semantically vacuous word in mainstream
HPSG is appropriate for some of its uses, such as the progressive and
the passive, but not for its use in clauses with a predicative complement.
In such clauses the copula denotes a relation
of coreference between the indices of the subject and the predicative
complement
Memory management for unification-based processing of typed feature structures
Get PDFWe consider two alternatives for memory management in
typed-feature-structure-based parsers by identifying structural
properties of grammar signatures that may be of some predictive
value in determining the consequences of those alternatives. We
define these properties, summarize the results of a number of
experiments on artificially constructed signatures with respect to
the relative rank of their asymptotic cost at parse-time, and
experimentally consider how they impact memory management
Dualist syntax
Get PDFA dualist syntax has two components: (1) the lexicon, a structured set
of formatives (\u27words\u27); and (2) rules for combining those formatives into
utterances. This paper defends syntactic dualism against three
\u27monist\u27 challenges.
First, evidence for lexical argument structure can be found in deverbal
nominalization, which preserves that structure systematically. Second,
words represent the smallest units for idiom formation and contextual polysemy
effects, which is expected on the dualist view but not if word meanings
are composed in the syntax. Third, the count/mass properties of nouns suggest
an interleaving of conceptual and grammatical information in semantic
composition
Reconsidering the coordinate structure constraint in Japanese and Korean: Syntactic constraint or pragmatic principle?
Get PDFWhether the Coordinate Structure Constraint (CSC) (Ross, 1967) is a
syntactic constraint has been discussed much in the literature. This
paper reconsiders this issue by drawing on evidence from Japanese and
Korean. Our examination of the CSC patterns in relative clauses in
the two languages reveals that a pragmatically-based approach along
the lines of Kehler (2002) predicts the relevant empirical patterns
straightforwardly whereas alternative syntactic approaches run into
many problems. We take these results to provide strong support for
the view that the CSC is a pragmatic principle rather than a syntactic
constraint
There-constructions with transitive verbs
Get PDFIn this paper we address the question of which transitive verbs
allow there-insertion in Danish. We propose that two constraints
have to be met in order for verbs to appear in Danish
there-constructions. Firstly, as have been noted by others, an empty
direct object position must be available. This constraint is not
sufficient for restricting the set of verbs in there-constructions.
We further propose a locative constraint. The transitive verbs allowing
there-insertion will be shown to coincide with verbs that allow a
locative analysis
Transparent free relatives in English
Get PDFTransparent free relatives (TFRs) are constituents involving a
WH-gap dependency in which the phrase that is predicated
of the gap associated with \u27what\u27, not the wh-phrase
itself, functions as the syntactic and semantic "nucleus."
Previous analyses have either treated TFRs as a construction
radically different from ordinary FRs, utilizing such mechanisms
as parenthetical placement or grafts, or assimilated them to
ordinary FRs, relying on abstract/empty head elements and a vague
semantic relation holding between the gap and the predicate
phrase. In this paper, we investigate how the puzzling properties
of English TFRs can be accounted for in HPSG. The paper shows that
the transparency effect of TRFs can be handled by feature
inheritance from the nucleus predicate phrase, together with a
constructional constraint that deals with the exocentric property
of TFRs
The exclamative clause type in French
Get PDFMy objective in this paper is to integrate scalar exclamatives into an HPSG grammar of
French. First, a procedure to sort out scalar exclamatives from declaratives and interrogatives is
proposed. Then, the main semantic and dialogical properties of exclamatives are presented:
veridicity, ego-evidentiality, illocutionary double life and scalarity. Finally, assuming Ginzburg &
Sag 2000, the exclamative clause type is defined
Predicate complements
Get PDFThis paper presents the canonical HPSG treatment of
predicate complements and points out a number of problems
with it. Then it proposes an alternative
and shows how it avoids or solves the problems with the canonical
treatment
A syntactic account of Romanian correlative coordination from a Romance perspective
Get PDFThis paper examines the syntactic behaviour of two omnisyndetic coordinations (also called
correlative coordinations), i.e. the disjunctive and the conjunctive types in Romanian, by
explaining its data in a Romance perspective. Major issue has been whether these structures have
symmetric or asymmetric structures. If all these Romance languages share a symmetric analysis for
the disjunctive type Conj ... Conj, it is not the case for the conjunctive type. Our aim is to show that
the postulation of a conjunctional status for the Romanian structure şi ... şi (\u27both ... and\u27), which is
the most widespread view in Romanian grammars, is inadequate for the Romanian data
Towards a grammar of preposition-noun combinations
Get PDFPreposition-noun combinations (PNCs) are compositional and
productive, but not fully regular. In school grammars and many
theoretical approaches, PNCs are neglected, but they have recently
been addressed in an HPSG analysis by Baldwin et al. (2006). After
discussing some basic properties of PNCs, we show that statistical
methods can be employed to prove that PNCs are indeed productive
and compositional, which again implies that PNCs should receive a
syntactic analysis. Such an analysis, however, is impeded by the
limited regularity of the construction. We will point out why adding
semantic conditions to syntactic schemata might be necessary but not
sufficient and turn then to a framework which allows the derivation of
syntactic (and semantic) generalizations from linguistic data without
taking recourse to introspective judgments