Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
Not a member yet
468 research outputs found
Sort by
A linear approach to negative prominence
Get PDFLanguages often require negation to be realized in a prominent position. A well
known example is Italian, which seems to require a pre-verbal realization of
negation. Some other languages require negation to be in a prominent position
but do not require it to be pre-verbal. An example is Swedish. Working within
Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), Sells (2000) proposes that Swedish requires a
negative element which is not inside VP and that Italian has the same
constraint. Similar facts are found in the VSO language Welsh. However,
Sellss approach cannot be applied to Welsh. Borsley and Jones (2005)
develop a selectional approach to Welsh, in which certain verbs require a
negative complement. This works well for Welsh but cannot be applied to Swedish
or Italian. A similar approach to all three languages is possible within the
linearization-based version of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG)
developed by Kathol (2000). It seems, then, that a linear approach is
preferable to both a structural and a selectional approach
A proposed lexicalised linearisation grammar: A monostratal alternative
Get PDFThis paper presents an overview of a proposed linearisation grammar, which
relies solely upon information residing in lexical heads to constrain word
order. Word order information, which encompasses discontinuity as well as
linear precedence conditions, is explicitly encoded as part of the feature
structure of lexical heads, thus dispensing with a separate LP specification or
ˋphenogrammatical\u27 layer standardly posited for linearisation. Instead, such
lexicon-originated word order constraints are enforced in projections,
propagated upwards and accumulated in the compound PHON feature, which
represents phonological yields in an underspecified manner. Though limited
somewhat in generative capacity, this approach covers the key phenomena that
motivated linearisation grammars and offers a simpler alternative to the
standard DOM-oriented theory
A unified analysis of French causatives
Get PDFThe treatment of French causatives and pronominal affixes outlined in Miller
and Sag (1997) and Abeillé et al. (1998) is notable for its
comprehensive coverage and analytic detail, but it relies on a number of ad
hoc features and types that have little empirical justification. We sketch
a new treatment of the same data set, which eliminates multiple lexical entries
for the causative, as well as a number of other undesirable analytic
devices. Our account builds on a long-standing observation that seeming
irregularities in the system of case assignment to the causee of faire
are not in fact exceptional, but determined by the general case assignment
behavior of transitive verbs. This generalization, first incorporated into an
HPSG analysis by Bratt (1990), was abandoned in subsequent HPSG work that
sought to expand the coverage of French beyond that of Bratt\u27s analysis. Our
goal here is to show that broad coverage need not come at the expense of
linguistically significant generalizations
Person and number agreement in American Sign Language
Get PDFAmerican Sign Language (ASL) has a group of verbs showing agreement with the
subject or/and object argument. There has not been analysis on especially
number agreement. This paper analyzes person and number agreement within the
HPSG framework. I discuss person and number hierarchy in ASL. The argument of
agreement verbs can be omitted as in languages like Italian. The constraints on
the type agreement-verb have the information on argument optionality
Long and short adjunct fronting in HPSG
Get PDFThe purpose of this paper is to consider the proper treatment of short- and
long-fronted adjuncts within HPSG. In the earlier HPSG analyses, a rigid
link between linear order and constituent structure determines the linear
position of such adjuncts in the sentence-initial position. This paper will
argue that there is a body of data which suggests that adjunct fronting does
not work as these approaches predict. I will then show that
linearisation-based HPSG can provide a fairly straightforward account of the
facts
A unified approach to questions, quantifiers, and coordination in Japanese
Get PDFThe Japanese language is one of the languages where universal and
existential quantification are expressed using wh-words with the
conjunctive and disjunctive particles, respectively. In this paper,
inspired by the syntactic and semantic parallelism found in Japanese
between quantification, coordination, and question, we seek to analyze
these constructions in a unified fashion. We investigate various
phenomena of these constructions and show how these three constructions
can be uniformly analyzed as cases where abstracted arguments are
questioned or quantified for verbs. We then present an HPSG
formalization of the analysis
Motion event and deictic motion verbs as path-conflating verbs
Get PDFThis paper attempts to decompose the Motion event into such elements as Figure,
Path, Vector, and Ground based upon Talmy\u27s framework, which makes it possible
to formally analyze and compare the lexical semantics of the deictic motion
verbs within and across languages. It is shown that the difference in
interpretations of the Path is attributable to the lexical specifications of
both deictic motion verbs and locative phrases. It is argued that deictic
motion verbs can be lexically specified for the entailment of arrival only if
they express the Path eventually directed to the deictic center. A formal
analysis is given based upon the HPSG framework in order to identify the
elements of a Motion event contributed by each element of a verb phrase, and to
determine the compositional fashion in which they are combined to give the
interpretation of the verb phrase as a whole
Coordination of unlikes without unlike categories
Get PDFSeveral analysis of Coordination of Unlikes have been proposed within the HPSG framework.
In some of these approaches the possible combinations of \u27unlike categories\u27 are encoded in
the grammar, while other accounts resort to an independently motivated ellipsis analysis.
In this paper we provide further arguments in favor of the latter. However, some problematic
cases of Coordination of Unlikes in certain S-adjoining constructions are left unaccounted for.
We propose a general analysis of these S-adjoining constructions, and in doing so,
the problematic coordination cases are predicted without the need for further assumptions
A phrase structure approach to argument cluster coordination
Get PDFIt has often been argued that Non-Constituent Coordinations involve
ellipsis. Focussing in this paper on so-called \u27Argument Cluster Coordination\u27,
we provide empirical evidence drawn from French against such elliptical
analyses. We then sketch an alternative approach within HPSG, allowing
non-standard constituents to be conjoined in the scope of some shared
predicate. While such non-standard constituents are generally obtained by
relaxing phrase structure, we propose analyzing them as non-headed
constructions, deriving their unusual properties from the interplay of two
different sets of constraints: those imposed by coordination and those imposed
by predicates that select such clusters as arguments
Uncovering regularities: On bare and evaluated controllers in Tigrinya
Get PDFThe "flexibility" of gender in Tigrinya is uncovered by (i) setting a value
for gender for each noun at the lexical level (i.e. bare controllers) and (ii)
analysing gender shifts as signals for evaluations (i.e. evaluated
controllers). The analysis is formalized as lexical rules which change the
value of gend and add an elementary predication in the rels list