Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
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Tongan noun incorporation: Lexical sharing or argument inheritance
Get PDFAs has been shown in other Polynesian languages, in Tongan, adnominal elements
can modify incorporated nouns in the noun incorporation construction. Two
analysis are considered in this paper for understanding this construction
within HPSG. The first, lexical sharing (Kim and Sells, this volume), views the
verbs that include incorporated nouns as being single words corresponding to
two syntactic atoms. However, this analysis makes incorrect predictions on the
transitivity of incorporation clauses. A second analysis, extending Malouf
(1999), views these words as verbs, but with some of the combinatorial
properties of nouns. This offers both a better account of the data, and
preserves the more restrictive theory of the morphology-syntax interface
Towards a semantic analysis of argument/oblique alternations in HPSG
Get PDFI examine the semantic contrasts exhibited by argument/oblique alternations
(argument realization alternations where one or more participants may
be realized either as a direct argument or an oblique). Previous HPSG accounts
of these have proposed that alternating verbs are ambiguous, where
each variant has a structured semantics that makes different participants more
or less structurally prominent in the semantic representation. I argue that
such accounts fail to capture the full richness of the contrasts exhibited by
such alternations, and propose instead a model that derives alternations from
the lexical entailments each verb associates with the alternating participant
A coordination module for a crosslinguistic grammar resource
Get PDFThe Grammar Matrix is a resource for linguists writing grammars of natural
languages; however, up to this point it has not included support for
coordination. In this paper, we survey the typological range of coordination
phenomena in the world\u27s languages, then detail the support, both syntactic and
semantic, for those phenomena in the Grammar Matrix. Furthermore, we describe
the concept of a Matrix module and our software that enables grammar writers
to easily produce an extensible starter grammar
The Tswana infinitive as a mixed category
Get PDFAfter studying the morphological and syntactic properties of Tswana
infinitives in some detail, we argue that a mixed category approach is
more adequate than a phrasal approach to account for the combination of
their common properties with the two different uses they are found in
An HPSG approach to the who/whom puzzle
Get PDFOrder domains were originally proposed to deal with constituent order, but
have recently been concerned with more than just linearization. This paper
seeks to contribute to this discussion by considering the possibility of
analysing word forms in terms of order domains. We focus on the
distribution of the English relative and interrogative pronouns who and
whom. It is shown that a small number of constraints can accommodate the
seemingly complex body of data. In particular, a linearization-based
constraint can provide a straightforward account for the quite puzzling
distribution which who and whom show in one of the register types
Selectional restrictions in HPSG: I\u27ll eat my hat!
Get PDFThis contribution is concerned with integrating the phenomenon of selectional
restrictions in HPSG. Firstly, the question of treating selectional
restrictions purely in the semantic module is tackled, as there are some
contextual (or pragmatic) influences, which can repair the ill-formedness of
violated selectional restrictions. Secondly, we present existing approaches to
selectional restrictions within the framework and, lastly, make our own
proposal which describes the subject as part of the semantics-pragmatics
interface. In particular, we show how a semantic ontology can be integrated
On binding domains
Get PDFIn this paper I want to explore reasons for replacing Binding Theory based on
the anaphor-pronoun dichotomy by a Binding Theory allowing more domains
restricting/defining anaphoric dependencies. This will, thus, have consequences
for the partitioning of anaphoric elements, presupposing more types of
\u27anaphors\u27/\u27pronouns\u27 than standard Binding Theory offers us
Copy constructions and their interaction with the copula in Korean
Get PDFWe argue here for a lexicalist analysis of the Korean copula
(following Kim, Sells and Wescoat (2004)), on the basis of different
properties of sequences of noun-plus-copula, which shows word-like
behavior, in contrast to noun and negative copula, which are
independent syntactic units. The interactions of these items with
various copy constructions brings out their clear differences. The
analysis is formalized in HPSG using Lexical Sharing, from Wescoat
(2002)
On non-canonical clause linkage
Get PDFThe present paper investigates a certain subset of clause linkage
phenomena and develops a constraint-based account to the empirical
fact that clauses need to be distinguished with respect to their degree of
integratedness into a potential matrix clause. Considering as example
German, it is shown that the generally assumed twofold distinction
between main and subordinate clauses (or root and embedded clauses)
does not suffice to deal with the presented data. It is argued that
the discussed linkage phenomena originate from syntactic, semantic and
pragmatic properties of the clauses involved, and should hence be
encoded in grammar
English object extraposition: A constraint-based approach
Get PDFAccording to the Projection Principle (Chomsky 1981), expletives have
no semantic content and thus cannot occur in theta-marked positions. However,
there are many examples where expletive it appears as a direct object,
in violation of the Projection Principle. The various attempts that have
been made to account for such cases (e.g. the case-based analysis of Authier
(1991), the predication analysis of Rothstein (1995), and the Specifier analysis
of Stroik (1991, 1996)) all posit movement of the expletive from a non-theta
marked position to direct object position. However, these analyses have
so far been unsuccessful in capturing several important contrasts, e.g.
variable optionality of the expletive it. This paper argues that such contrasts (and
the complex behavior of expletive it more generally) follow straightforwardly
from a lexicalist, constraint-based analysis in which lexical information and
independently motivated constraints interact in subtle ways