Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
Not a member yet
468 research outputs found
Sort by
When a head is not a head: A constructional approach to exocentricity in English
Get PDFAs the name of the framework suggests, one of the driving forces behind traditional HPSG analyses is the notion of head. With the exception of a few non-headed constructions (i.e., mostly coordination), constructions are typically seen as being headed by a particular word or phrase with the nonhead constituting a complement, specifier or adjunct. The head determines the internal composition of a phrase and is responsible for its external distribution. Moreover, syntactic headedness, as determined by morphosyntactic criteria, is typically assumed to coincide with semantic headness. In the case of NPs, for instance, this means that the semantic contribution (including the index) of the entire phrase is provided by the element that is the head by morphosyntactic criteria (typically the noun).
In this paper, we intend to challenge this view of heads on the basis of two constructions from English. In both instances, we will argue that the constituents that are responsible for the internal combinatorial make-up of the phrase do not constitute heads because they fail both to determine the external distribution of the phrase and to contribute the semantic index of the projected phrase. At the same time, however, we will show that it is possible to view these cases not as random departures from more well-behaved headed constructions, but instead as particular instantiations of more general construction types which do not impose strict conditions on external headedness
What does it mean to be a complement?
Get PDFThis paper shows that the Gerund Phrase (GP) in the Spanish Gerund Construction
(e.g., El jefe entró a su oficina corriendo, lit. The boss entered his office
running ) is sometimes a complement (in SGCC) and sometimes an adjunct (in
SGCA). Although in both cases, the GP expresses a non-argument of the main
lexical verb\u27s denotation, it is a syntactic adjunct in SGCA and a syntactic
dependent of the main clause s head in SGCC. We argue that there is a semantic
correlate of this syntactic difference and propose a general principle that
constrains the semantic relations that can hold between the denotata of heads
and added members of their ARG-ST lists: The two denotata must be part of a
larger macro-event in the sense of Talmy (2000). We further show that the
relation between the events denoted by the gerund and main verbs involves four
semantic conditions and that which subset of those four conditions are
satisfied in a particular SGCC sentence determines what subkind of SGCC is
involved
A compositional and constraint-based approach to non-sentential utterances
Get PDFWe present an approach to the interpretation of non-sentential
utterances like B\u27s utterance in the following mini-dialogue:
A: ˋˋWho came to the party?\u27\u27
B: ˋˋPeter.´´
Such utterances pose several puzzles: they convey
ˋsentence-type\u27 messages (propositions, questions or request)
while being of non-sentential form; and they are constrained
both semantically and syntactically by the context. We address
these puzzles in our approach which is compositional, since we
provide a formal semantics for such fragments independent of
their context, and constraint-based because resolution is
based on collecting contextual constraints
Out of control: A unified analysis of Japanese passive constructions
Get PDFIn this paper I develop a unified analysis of the Japanese passive, which provides a uniform syntactic/semantic representation of the alleged varieties of passives (direct, indirect, possessive) as a complex predicate that encodes the triadic relation of "lack of control" among an agent, undergoer and event. Various differences among the direct, possessive, and indirect passives (the adversative effect implicature, the possibility of reflexive binding, the animacy constraint on the subject, etc.) are explained as cooperative effects of the core syntactic/sematic properties of the passive morpheme -(r)are and functional/pragmatic factors like conversational implicature and empathy constraints
A linearization-based theory of summative agreement in peripheral-node raising constructions
Get PDFThe aim of this paper is to present a theory that explicitly characterizes patterns of summative agreement. The proposed theory builds on my own theory of PNR, presented in Yatabe 2001, and is based on the view that agreement results from a non-lexical constraint that regulates under what circumstances a domain object can be merged with other domain objects by the compaction operation
EDGE features and French liaison
Get PDFThis paper presents a descriptive overview of liaison, giving an idea of the scope of the phenomenon and possible approaches to its analysis. As for the contextual conditions on liaison, in many cases, the traditional notions of obligatory and prohibited liaison do not reflect speakers\u27 actual behavior. It turns out that general syntactic constraints cannot determine the systematic presence or absence of liaison at a given word boundary. At best, specific constraints can be formulated to target particular classes of constructions. To express such constraints, I propose a system of representation in the framework of HPSG. The use of EDGE features (introduced by Miller (1992) for a GPSG treatment of French) provides the necessary link between phrasal descriptions and the properties of phrase-peripheral elements
Cooperating constructions in Lai "lexical insertion"
Get PDFIn this paper we investigate the factors conditioning a morphological
alternation on verbal heads in Lai. We show that this alternation
eludes a simple characterization and instead exhibits a many-to-many
form-function mapping. We will further show that the facts can be
given a straightforward analysis in terms of default conditions based
on valence and polarity, together with various constructional
overrides. Our analysis thus follows recent proposals in HPSG, in
particular Malouf (forthcoming), in using a constructional type
hierarchy with defaults (cooperating constructions) as an
alternative to an Optimality Theoretic system of ranked violable
constraints
Valence alternations in Modern Greek: An MRS analysis
Get PDFThe aim of this paper is to provide a semantic account of valence alternations in Modern Greek of the following general form:
(1) NPk V NPi [P NPj] —> NPk V NPj [P NPi]
In other words, the valence alternations in Modern Greek we focus on in this paper are the ones involving direct internal arguments (i.e., objects) and indirect prepositional complements. Such alternation patterns in Modern Greek characterize mainly the behaviour of verbal predicates which participate in the so-called Locative Alternation phenomena
The syntactic flexibility of adverbs: French degree adverbs
Get PDFWhile French degree words in French have been assigned several syntactic
categories, we show that they are rather highy polymorphic adverbs (they occur
in all syntactic domains), which select the expression they modify on a purely
semantic basis. Like French adverbs in general, they occur both to the left and
to the right of the head they modify. Following previous work (a.o. van Noord
and Bouma 1994, Abeillé and Godard 1997, Bouma et al. 2000), we assign them two
different grammatical functions, adjuncts and complements. Semantically, they
differ from quantifiers. We follow Kennedy (2000) who analyzes them as scalar
predicate modifiers. Finally, the specific syntactic constraints that
characterize a subset of them can be shown to follow from, or be related to,
their weight properties (Abeillé and Godard 2000). We conclude that their
apparently idiosyncratic properties fit into a more general theory of grammar