Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
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Clitic left dislocation and focus projection in Spanish
Get PDFThe information-structural status of clitic left dislocated arguments in
Spanish has been argued to depend crucially on their thematic role.
Earlier HPSG analyses of related phenomena in other languages do not
take into account this sort of information. A formalization will be
presented which can handle differences in information-structure arising
from different thematic roles of clitic left dislocated phrases
Children\u27s use of argument structure, meta-knowledge of the lexicon, and extra-linguistic contextual cues in inferring meanings of novel verbs
Get PDFVerbs are the centerpiece of the sentence, and understanding of verb meanings is essential for
language acquisition. Yet verb learning is said to be more challenging than noun learning for young
children for several reasons. First, while nouns tend
to denote concrete objects, which are perceptually
stable over time, verbs tend to refer to action events,
which are temporally ephemeral, and the beginning
and the end of the action referred to by the verb are
not clearly specified. Second, a verb takes nouns as
arguments, and the meaning of a verb is determined
as the relation between the arguments. To infer the
meaning of a verb, children need to attend to the
relation between the objects in the event rather than
the objects themselves. In so doing, children make
use of a variety of cues such as argument structure,
meta-knowledge of the lexicon, and extra-linguistic
contextual cues. In this paper, I present two lines of
my recent research concerning young children\u27s
novel verb learning. Specifically, I first report a
cross-linguistic study (Imai et al., 2008) examining
how Japanese-, English-, and Chinese-speaking
children utilize structural and non-structural,
extra-linguistic cues when inferring novel verb
meanings. Second, I present another study examining
how young children utilize sound-meaning correlates
(sound symbolism) in their inference of novel verb
meanings. In the end, I evaluate the relative
importance of structural cues among different cues
children use in verb learning
Complex case phenomena in the Grammar Matrix
Get PDFThis paper describes a number of verbal argument marking patterns found in the world\u27s languages and
provides HPSG analyses for them. In addition to commonly-occurring variations of morphosyntactic
alignment (e.g. nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive), this paper also presents analyses of
more complex phenomena, including ergativity splits, Austronesian-style focus-case systems, and
direct-inverse systems and their interaction with case
Transparent heads
Get PDFHead-complement structures in HPSG identify most properties of the phrase with those of the head
daughter, except for that valence property (e.g. SUBCAT or COMPS) whose constraints are met by the
non-head daughter(s) in the phrase. In this paper I present several phenomena in English syntax
where idiosyncratic properties of a non-head daughter in a phrase must remain visible on the phrasal
node, in order to preserve the strong version of the principle of locality in subcategorization. I
propose a general formal mechanism to effect this occasional transparency of heads with respect to
certain properties of their complements
The representation of syllable structure in HPSG
Get PDFThis paper proposes a representation for syllable structure in HPSG, building on previous work by
Bird and Klein (1994), Höhle (1999), and Crysmann (2002). Instead of mapping segments into a a
separate part of the sign where syllables are represented structurally, information about
syllabification is encoded directly in the list of segments, the core of the PHONOLOGY value. Higher
level prosodic phenomena can operate on a more abstract representation of the sequence of syllables
derived from the syllabified segments list. The approach is illustrated with analyses of some
word-boundary phenomena conditioned by syllable structure in French
Korean postpositions as weak syntactic heads
Get PDFThis paper deals with Korean postpositions. They are treated as suffixes in recent lexicalist
works. But they differ syntactically from suffixes and we will propose to treat them as clitics,
i.e. words combining with a phrase in the syntax and attaching to its last lexical item in the
phonology. We treat them as weak syntactic heads, taking into account their head properties and the
syntactic similarity between the mother phrase and the host phrase. They take the latter as
complement and share most of its syntactic properties. Revising the traditional classification, we
divide postpositions into three subtypes: marking, oblique and semantic postpositions, based on
their distributional properties, such as optionality, non-nominal marking and stacking, etc. Finally
we show how our analysis can be described in the HPSG model
On the syntax of direct quotation in French
Get PDFDirect quotation raises three major problems for grammatical modelling: (i) the variety of quoted
material (which can be a non linguistic behavior, or a sign in a different language), (ii) the
embedding of an utterance inside another one, (iii) a special denotation, the content of the
quotation being the utterance itself. We propose a unary rule, which turns the quoted material into
a linguistic sign whose content is itself a behavior, which entertains a resemblance relation to the
behavior demonstrated by the speaker. Syntactically, direct quotation comes in two varieties: it can
be the complement of a quotative verb, or constitutes a head sentence, modified by an adjunct
containing a quotative verb whose complement is extracted and identified with its local features
Radical non-configurationality without shuffle operators: An analysis of Wambaya
Get PDFThe word order facts of radically non-configurational languages pose a challenge to HPSG
approaches which assume both that the surface order of words is the yield of the (tectogrammatical)
tree and standard HPSG-style cancellation of valence lists. These languages allow discontinuous noun
phrases, in which modifiers appear separated from their head nouns by arbitrarily many other words
from the same clause. In this paper, I explore an analysis which preserves
tectogrammatical-phenogrammatical equivalence, and accounts for the word order facts of Wambaya with
an analysis based on non-cancellation. This analysis is contrasted with other approaches to
discontinuous constituents and analyses of other phenomena based on non-cancellation. Finally, I
explore the implications for current models of semantic compositionality
An analysis of pseudopartitives and measure phrases that say no to extra rules
Get PDFOur analysis of pseudopartitives and measure phrases draws on the idea of ˋof\u27 as a copula in a
pseudopartitive. The copular analysis allows us to avoid the complications caused by treating either
the numeral-noun combination before the of-phrase or the of-object as the head of a pseudopartitive
on agreement, and hence to account for all the agreement patterns without creating any extra
rule. We also outline how we can extend our analysis to handle measure phrases that do not co-occur
with of-phrases by treating these measure phrases as anaphoric, an analysis that can adapt to the
anaphoric constructions in classifier languages. Such an analysis does not only come closer to the
intuition of native speakers but also have an appeal from the perspective of the universality of
languages