Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
Not a member yet
468 research outputs found
Sort by
A comprehensive theory of coordination of unlikes
Get PDFThe principal aim of this paper is to present a comprehensive theory of
coordination of unlikes, i.e., a theory that is capable of dealing with
every phenomenon resulting from coordination of unlikes.
The proposed theory accounts not just for standard cases of coordination
of unlike arguments and coordination of unlike functors but also for cases
involving single-conjunct agreement and what will be called each-conjunct agreement.
In the course of the argumentation, it is also shown that, even in a language like English,
predicate-argument agreement needs to be described in terms of a relational
constraint that is not simply an identity requirement
Underspecification of intersective modifier attachment: Some arguments from German
Get PDFIn this paper, I shall discuss the semantic attachment of intersective
modifiers in German coherent constructions. I shall show that a purely
syntactic solution to the observable attachment ambiguity is undesirable for
reasons of processing e ciency and/or massive spurious ambiguity. Instead, I
shall follow Egg and Lebeth (1995) and propose an extension to Minimal
Recursion Semantics, permitting the expression of underspecified semantic
attachment. This rather trivial move, as we shall see, will not only be
preferable for processing reasons, but it will also be more in line with the
spirit of underspecified semantics, e ectively providing a compact
representation of purely semantic distinctions, instead of unfolding these
distinctions into a rain forest of tree representations and derivations. I will
present an implementation of the underspecification approach integrated into
the German HPSG developed at DFKI and compare its e ciency to an alternative
implementation where semantic attachment is unfolded by means of retrieval
rules
GIDLP: A grammar format for linearization-based HPSG
Get PDFLinearization-based HPSG theories are widely used for analyzing languages with
relatively free constituent order. This paper introduces the Generalized ID/LP
(GIDLP) grammar format, which supports a direct encoding of such theories, and
discusses key aspects of a parser that makes use of the dominance, precedence,
and linearization domain information explicitly encoded in this grammar
format. We show that GIDLP grammars avoid the explosion in the number of rules
required under a traditional phrase structure analysis of free constituent
order. As a result, GIDLP grammars supportmore modular and compact grammar
encodings and require fewer edges in parsing
Head-initial constructions in Japanese
Get PDFJapanese is often taken to be strictly head-final in its syntax. In our work on
a broad-coverage, precision implemented HPSG for Japanese, we have found that
while this is generally true, there are nonetheless a few minor exceptions to
the broad trend. In this paper, we describe the grammar engineering project,
present the exceptions we have found, and conclude that this kind of phenomenon
motivates on the one hand the HPSG type hierarchical approach which allows for
the statement of both broad generalizations and exceptions to those
generalizations and on the other hand the usefulness of grammar engineering as
a means of testing linguistic hypotheses
An analysis of depictive secondary predicates in German without discontinuous constituents
Get PDFIn Müller, 2005 I provide evidence that suggests that linearization approaches
that analyze German clause structure with discontinuous constituents
cannot account for the German clause structure in an insightful way.
In order to eliminate the very powerful concept of linearization
domains and discontinuous constituents from the grammar,
analyses of other phenomena which also rely on discontinuous constituents should therefore
be revised.
In this paper, I develop an analysis of German depictive secondary predicates
that differs from the one suggested in Müller, 2002 by assuming binary branching structures,
verb movment, and continuous constituents instead of a linearization approach. Some shortcomings of previous analyses are pointed
out and it is shown how linearization constraints regarding depictive predicate and antecedent
can be modeled
Propositional relative clauses in German
Get PDFThis paper discusses a special kind of syntax-semantics mismatch: a
noun with a relative clause is interpreted as if it were a complement
clause. An analysis in terms of Lexical Resource Semantics is
developed which provides a uniform account for ˋˋnormal\u27\u27 relative
clauses and for the discussed type of relative clause
A compound matrix
Get PDFThis paper presents a suplement to the Grammar Matrix, namely what I call a
Compound Matrix ; in reality, it is not a matrix, since the type file includes
a fully specified cross-linguistic inventory of compound types. The idea is
that the grammar writer can comment out the ungrammatical types for his or her
own language. The theory behind the typology is presented here in a bottom-up
fashion, from the basic assumptions to the actual linguistic types
Mismatches at the syntax-semantics interface
Get PDFRecent analyses of mismatches at the syntax-semantics interface
investigate e.g. modification of agentive nouns (Larson, 1998),
modification of quantifying pronouns (Abney, 1987), or recursive
modification (Kasper, to appear). Each of these analyses is tailored
to a specific set of data, and it is not immediately obvious how
they could be generalised to cover a larger set of data.
I propose a unified analysis for these mismatches that attempts to
bring out their common ground. This analysis shares some of its
basic intuitions with the one of Kasper, but is more general because
the mismatches are handled locally in the CONT feature. Its pivot is
an elaborate syntax-semantics interface that is based on a
surface-oriented syntactic analysis. This analysis generalises
easily to the mismatches at the morphology-semantics interface for
German separable-prefix verbs that were discussed in (Müller, 2003)
Constraint-based RMRS construction from shallow grammars
Get PDFWe present a constraint-based syntax-semantics interface
for the construction of RMRS (Robust Minimal Recursion
Semantics) representations from shallow grammars. The
architecture is designed to allow modular interfaces to
existing shallow grammars of various depth - ranging
from chunk grammars to context-free stochastic grammars.
We define modular semantics construction principles in
a typed feature structure formalism that allow flexible
adaptation to alternative grammars and different languages
Sign language generation in an ALE HPSG
Get PDFDuring the past fifty years sign languages have been
recognised as genuine languages with their own syntax and
distinctive phonology. In the case of sign languages,
phonetic description characterises the manual and
non-manual aspects of signing. The latter relate to facial
expression and upper torso position. In the case of manual
components these characterise hand shape, orientation and
position, and hand/arm movement in three dimensional space
around the signer\u27s body. These phonetic charcaterisations
can be notated as HamNoSys descriptions of signs which has
an executable interpretation to drive an avatar.
The HPSG sign language generation component of a text to
sign language system prototype is described. The
assimilation of SL morphological features to generate signs
which respect positional agreement in signing space are
emphasised