bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Arguments, grammatical relations, and diathetic paradigm
Authors: Avgustinova Tania
Published: December 2021

Formalized as a systematic interaction between a tier of co-arguments and a tier of co-dependents, the concept of diathesis offers a considerable theoretical advantage in stating linguistic generalizations. Based on Slavic data, this paper argues for the general notion of dependents in HPSG, in addition to arguments and subcategorized elements (valence). It attempts to provide a systematic inventory of ARG-ST / DEPS mappings which results in a diathetic paradigm. The approach offers an insightful cross-linguistic and cross-constructional perspective.
rest of the binding theory
Authors: Golde Karin
Published: December 2021

This paper examines the distribution of English self-pronouns (himself, herself, etc.) in contrast with personal pronouns. We confirm that there are factors affecting the acceptability of self-pronouns at the syntactic, semantic, and discourse levels, and devise a Principle A with three distinct clauses to account for all of them. Each clause is crucially ordered with respect to the others, with syntax taking precedence over semantics, which in turn takes precedence over discourse constraints.
information structure of discontinuous NPs in German
Authors: De Kuthy Kordula
Published: December 2021

This paper investigates a particular word order phenomenon in German, the occurrence of discontinuous NPs (which we refer to as the NP-PP split construction) in order to probe the division of labor between the syntactic analysis and discourse constraints on this construction. We argue that some of the factors which previous literature has tried to explain in terms of syntactic restrictions are in fact derivable from discourse factors. Building on these insights, we show how an information structure component can be integrated into an HPSG account of the phenomenon.
Shape conditions and phonological context
Authors: Asudeh Ash , Klein Ewan
Published: December 2021

This paper builds on Zwicky's (1986) notion of shape condition, that is, a rule that specifies the phonological shape of inflected forms "by reference to triggers at least some of which lie outside the syntactic word". Zwicky observes that "many rules traditionally classified as external sandhi rules are [shape conditions]". They are not phonological rules in the usual sense, since they only apply to specific lexical items and are active within syntactic rather than phonological domains.

Shape conditions are problematic in many standard grammar architectures. On the one hand, they seem to be constraints on lexical entries, while on the other hand, they make reference to the syntactic context. Hayes (1990) has sketched a theory of "precompiled phrasal phonology" in which allomorph choice is conditioned by subcategorization frames in lexical entries. However, his approach is not formalized in any detail, and moreover makes the implicit claim that the relation between a shape condition target and its triggers can be equated with the syntactic relation between a lexical head and its complement. Although this assumption holds good for the Hausa phenomena he addresses, we do not believe that it holds in general.

HPSG appears to offer promising framework for formalizing something like Hayes' approach, but the standard machinery also makes it hard to distinguish a shape condition trigger from a complement. In order to overcome this difficulty, we develop the notion of phonological context: a feature of signs which allows us to condition allomorphic alternation in terms of (i) the phonological edges, and (ii) the syntactic properties of an expression's immediate syntactic sisters. We show how our analysis deals with four illustrative cases: the indefinite article alternation in English, syncretic liaison forms for possessive pronouns in French, Hausa verb-final vowel shortening, and soft mutation in Welsh nouns.
syntax-semantics interface for tense and aspect in French
Authors: Bonami Olivier
Published: December 2021

This paper proposes an HPSG account of the French tense and aspect system, focussing on the analysis of the passé simple (simple past) and imparfait (imperfective) tenses and their interaction with aspectually sensitive adjuncts. Starting from de Swart's (1998) analysis of the semantics of tense and aspect, I show that while the proposed semantic representations are appropriate,  the analysis of implicit aspectual operators as coercion operators is inadequate.
The proposed HPSG analysis relies on Minimal Recursion Semantics to relate standard syntactic structures with de Swart-style semantic representations. The analysis has two crucial features: first, it assumes that the semantic contribution of tense  originates in the verb's semantic representation, despite the fact that tense can get wide scope over other semantic elements. Second, it allows the occurrence of implicit aspectual operators to be controlled by the verb's inflectional class, which accounts for their peculiar distribution.
Mixed categories and argument transfer in Korean light verb constructions
Authors: Choi Incheol , Wechsler Stephen
Published: December 2021

The Korean Light Verb Construction (LVC) contains a Sino-Korean main predicate (tayhwa-lul), a Light Verb (ha-ta), and semantic arguments of the main predicate (John-i, Tom-kwa):
          John-i        Tom-kwa tayhwa-lul  ha-yess-ta.          John-Nom Tom-with talk-Acc     do-Pst-Dc                         'John talked with Tom.'
We defend a three-part analysis:  (i) The subject of the main predicate is thematically controlled by the LV's subject.  Evidence: Korean verbs assigning Accusative take an external argument (Wechsler/Lee 1996; Burzio's Generalization).  Since the main predicate is Accusative, ha-ta must theta-mark its subject.  Moreover ha-ta selects a non-stative Verbal Noun (VN) (cp. *kyumson-ul ha-ta 'humble-Acc do-Dc'); non-stative theta-structures typically take an external argument (Kang 1986). This control arises through complex predicate formation.  (ii) Oblique arguments (PPs) are optionally transferred (cp. Grimshaw/Mester 1988) — but Accusative NPs are not.  Evidence comes from relativization and pronoun replacement.  (iii) Accusative is assigned by a mixed category Verbal Noun.  This can be supported by adverbial clauses with VN's assigning Accusative without LV's.  We review cross-linguistic evidence for both argument transfer (German; Hinrichs & Nakazawa; i.a.) and mixed categories (many languages, Malouf; i.a.) and show that Korean LVCs provide the right environment for both to occur.
Verb-particle constructions in a computational grammar of English
Authors: Villavicencio Aline , Copestake Ann
Published: December 2021

In this paper we investigate the phenomenon of verb-particle constructions, discussing their characteristics and the challenges that they present for a computational grammar. We concentrate our discussion on the treatment adopted in a wide-coverage HPSG grammar: the LinGO ERG. Given the constantly growing number of verb-particle combinations, possible ways of extending this treatment are investigated, taking into account the regular patterns found in some productive combinations of verbs and particles. We analyse possible ways of identifying regular patterns using different resources. One possible way to try to capture these is by means of lexical rules, and we discuss the difficulties encountered when adopting such an approach. We also investigate how to restrict the productivity of lexical rules to deal with subregularities and exceptions to the patterns found.
Clitic climbing revisited
Authors: Crysmann Berthold
Published: December 2021

Presently, there is overall consent among researchers on Romance in HPSG (Miller and Sag, 1997, Abeillé et al., 1998, Monachesi, 1996, 1999) that bounded clitic climbing (CC) is best understood in terms of argument composition. Despite the fact that all current analyses of CC are based on the same core idea, individual analyses of this phenomenon differ.In this paper, I shall propose a unified approach that will be applicable to CC in both French and Italian. The approach will be cast entirely in terms of valence lists, argument structure and slash, such that construction- or language-specific book-keeping devices can be eliminated. As a side-effect, this approach provides a more strengthened view of lexical integrity, in that morphological information, i.e. an argument's mode of realisation, will not be directly accessible for subcategorisation.
Non-transitive information flow in Japanese noun-classifier matching
Authors: Levy Roger , Oshima David Yoshikazu
Published: December 2021

In Japanese, as in other classifier languages like Chinese and Malay, numerals
do not directly quantize nouns, but first combine with a classifier to form a
measure phrase (MP; cf. Aikhenvald 2000). From the perspective of
constraint-based approaches to syntax/semantics, the mutual selective
restriction between classifiers and nouns can be stated in terms of
information-sharing and featural identity, to some extent parallel to the
treatment of gender/number agreement (between determiner and noun, for
instance) (cf. Pollard and Sag 1994; Kathol 1999). There are, however, data
that challenge this line of approach to noun-classifier matching. We
demonstrate in this paper that it is possible that a single noun is associated
with different types of classifier, and show why they are problematic for
unification-based approaches, similar to the situation with case syncretism in
European languages (Ingria 1990 and others). Later in the paper, we argue that
information-sharing between noun, predicate and classifier is not completely
transitive, and present a formal analysis which models multiple selectional
requirements with sets.
On the notion ˋˋdeterminer''
Authors: Van Eynde Frank
Published: December 2021

Following a common practice in generative grammar, HPSG treats the
determiners as members of a separate functional part of speech (Det).
The status of the functional parts of speech is a matter of debate and
controversy. The auxiliaries, for instance, are commonly treated as
members of a separate functional category (Aux or Infl) in many variants
of generative grammar, including GB, MP and LFG, but in
GPSG and HPSG, it is a matter of equally common practice
to treat them as members of V and to reject the postulation of
a separate functional category, see
Pullum & Wilson (1977) and Gazdar, Pullum & Sag (1982).
This text makes a similar case for the determiners; more
specifically, it argues that the determiners are categorially
heterogeneous, in the sense that some are members of A, whereas
others are members of N. The argumentation is mainly based on
inflectional morphology and morpho-syntactic agreement data.
The consequences of the categorial heterogeneity are hard to
reconcile with the specifier treatment of the determiners in
Pollard & Sag (1994) and with the Det-as-head treatment in
Netter (1994), but it can smoothly be integrated in the
functor treatment of the prenominals in Allegranza (1998) and
Van Eynde (2002).
Dealing with optional complements in HPSG-based grammar implementations
Authors: De Kuthy Kordula , Meurers W. Detmar
Published: December 2021

This paper discusses how the English Resource Grammar (ERG)
captures the optionality of certain complements of verbs based on
a single lexical entry coupled with an ontology of markings
distinguishing optional from obligatory as well as unrealized from
realized elements. Subject-head and head-complement structures
are modified accordingly, but due to the lack of a possibility to
express and use relational goals in grammars implemented in the
LKB system, the ERG encoding falls short of the goal of treating
optional complements in a general way. Instead, it requires two
new types of ˋauxiliary' phrases which are otherwise unmotivated.
We show that the problem can be overcome by using a recursive
relation selecting a member from a list. The use of a lean
implementation platform not supporting such relational goals, such
as the LKB, thus results in a loss of generality of the grammars
that can be expressed, which undermines the closeness of the
implemented grammar to current linguistic analyses as one of the
hallmarks of HPSG-based grammar implementation. The case study
presented in this paper thus supports the position argued in Götz
and Meurers (1997) that a system for the implementation of
HPSG-based grammars should include both universal implicational
principles as well as definite clauses over feature terms.
A constraint-based approach to information structure and prosody correspondence
Authors: Haji-Abdolhosseini Mohammad
Published: December 2021

This paper provides a constraint-based account of
information-prosody correspondence within the HPSG framework. The
starting point of the paper is Klein's (2000) account of prosodic
constituency in HPSG. However, it departs from the standard
syntactocentric architecture of grammar, and adopts a grammar design
in which syntax, phonology, and information structure are generated
in parallel, with all three applying to a common list of domain
objects. It is shown that this theoretical architecture elegantly
captures many of the various constraints that have been shown to
hold in classical views of grammar.
License to COLL: How to bind bound words and readings to their contexts
Authors: Soehn Jan-Philipp
Published: December 2021

In this contribution we propose a new module for handling idioms and
distributional idiosyncrasies. Based on the concept by Richter/Sailer (1999)
the new feature COLL (context of lexical licensing) plays the central role in
our approach. We provide a way to handle decomposable and nondecomposable
idioms and idioms containing bound words. Our module guarantees the
co-occurrence of all idiom parts and of bound word and licensing context,
respectively. A prerequisite for our analysis is a means to select for
particular elements in the lexicon. We introduce another feature, LISTEME,
which gives each lexical item its unique identifier andmakes it possible to
select for a particular lexical word or phrase. Finally, we compare our
proposal with alternative approaches and give some ideas regarding further
applications beyond idiomaticity.
An approach to English comparative correlatives
Authors: Borsley Robert D.
Published: December 2021

Recent syntactic theory has highlighted the importance of peripheral
constructions such as the comparative correlative construction. This
construction involves a pair of filler-gap constructions with unusual
properties. The first is a subordinate clause and the second a main clause. The
construction has a number of related constructions. A version of HPSG, which
assumes hierarchies of phrase types, can provide satisfactory analyses both for
the comparative correlative constructions and for the related
constructions. The two clauses in the comparative-correlative construction can
be analysed as non-standard head-filler phrases differing from standard
headfiller phrases in certain respects. The construction as a whole can be
analyzed as a non-standard head-adjunct phrase, in which the head and the
phrase have different categories.
An HPSG approach to the who/whom puzzle
Authors: Maekawa Takafumi
Published: December 2021

Order 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.
Towards a semantic analysis of argument/oblique alternations in HPSG
Authors: Beavers John
Published: December 2021

I 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.
Persian free relatives
Authors: Taghvaipour Mehran A.
Published: December 2021

Free relatives (FRs) in Persian are Unbounded Dependency Constructions,
containing gaps or resumptive pronouns (RPs). In some positions only gaps are
allowed, and in some other positions only RPs. The structure of Persian FRs is
bipartite, containing two constituents: a phrasal part and a
sentential. Persian FRs are sensitive to the matching effect and show distinct
properties from noun phrases, ordinary relative clauses, and interrogative
complements. This paper proposes a unified HPSG account which assumes that the
phrasal part of a FR is the head and the filler at the same time. The propped
approach is presented in two versions (with and without traces) and can take
care of the dependency between the gap or the RP and the licencing constituent
with a truly single mechanism.
Plural comitative constructions in Polish
Authors: Trawinski Beata
Published: December 2021

This paper provides a treatment of Polish Plural Comitative Constructions
in the paradigm of HPSG in the tradition of Pollard and Sag (1994).
Plural Comitative Constructions (PCCs) have previously been treated in terms of
coordination, complementation and adjunction. The objective of this paper is to show
that PCCs are neither instances of typical coordinate structures nor of typical complement or
adjunct structures. It thus appears difficult to properly describe them by means of the
standard principles of syntax and semantics. The analysis proposed in this paper accounts for the
syntactic and semantic properties of PCCs in Polish by assuming an adjunction-based syntactic
structure for PCCs, and by treating the indexical information provided by PCCs not as subject to
any inheritance or composition, but as a result of applying a set of principles on number, gender and
person resolution that also hold for ordinary coordinate structures.
Reflexives: Escaping exemption via domain reshuffling
Authors: Branco António
Published: December 2021

In this paper we argue that at least for some languages, when
there are suitable o-commanders of its selectional domain, a
reflexive in the bottom of its obliqueness hierarchy escapes
exemption via a reshuffling of its local binding domain. The
outcome of such reshuffling is that the local domain extends to
include o-commanders of the reflexive in the subcategorization
domain immediately upstairs, that is in the domain whose head
predicator directly subcategorizes the domain headed by the
predicator directly subcategorizing the reflexive.
Implementing Norwegian reflexives in an HPSG grammar
Authors: Hellan Lars
Published: December 2021

The paper reviews basic patterns of reflexive binding in Norwegian, and
explores a possible implementation of them in an HPSG grammar using the
LKB platform. Norwegian has two reflexive elements, with distinct
constraints and corresponding 'anti-binding' effects; they can cooccur
but also occur independently. As over-all strategy for resolving
reflexive binding we use one resembling the 'slash' procedure for
wh-dependencies. Binding constraints are imposed partly through lexical
specification, partly through phrasal combination rules. Challenges are
noted residing in the possibility for sentences to contain an unbounded
number of reflexives.
A coordination module for a crosslinguistic grammar resource
Authors: Drellishak Scott , Bender Emily M.
Published: December 2021

The 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's 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.
A linear approach to negative prominence
Authors: Borsley Robert D.
Published: December 2021

Languages 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,
Sellss 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.
Constraining aspectual composition
Authors: Flouraki Maria
Published: December 2021

In Modern Greek there is a rich aspectual system, which involves both
morphologically expressed grammatical aspect and eventuality types, carried
primarily by the meaning of the verbal predicate. Particular emphasis is paid
to the interaction between grammatical aspect and eventuality types, since it
is due to this interaction that the verbal predicate acquires distinct
meanings. In order to explain potential changes in the meaning of the
eventualities caused by the interaction with grammatical aspect, I propose a
formal analysis within HPSG, using Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS) for the
semantic representations. Following the MRS architecture, I introduce a number
of relations, which represent both grammatical aspect and eventuality
types. The close interaction between grammatical aspect and eventuality types
triggers special meanings which traditionally can be explained by inserting
contextual information into the representations. In this paper, I argue against
such an analysis, providing an alternative which is based on the introduction
of subeventual templates formulated by Michaelis (2003) and Pustejovsky
(1995). In this context, grammatical aspect combines with eventuality types and
selects eventualities or subeventualities appropriate to its selection
restrictions, using information that is already there in the denotation of the
eventualities.
Extending partial pro-drop in Modern Hebrew: A comprehensive analysis
Authors: Melnik Nurit
Published: December 2021

Modern Hebrew is considered to be a 'partial pro-drop language'. Traditionally, the distinction
between cases where pro-drop is licensed and those in which it is prohibited, was based on the
person and tense features of the verb: 1st and 2nd person pronominal subjects may be omitted in
past and future tense. This generalization, however, was found to be false in a number of papers,
each discussing a subset of the data. Thus, contrary to conventional wisdom, dropped 3rd person
pronouns subjects do occur in the language in particular contexts.

Identifying these contexts by way of a corpus-based survey is the initial step taken in this study.
Subsequently, a careful syntactic analysis of the data reveals broad generalizations which have not
been made to date. Thus, what was initially assumed to be a uniform phenomenon of 3rd person
pro-drop turns out to be manifested in three distinct types of constructions. Finally, the proposed
HPSG-based analysis incorporates insights concerning locality, correlations between finite and non-finite
control, non-canonical elements, and binding.
Constructing Spanish complex predicates
Authors: Norcliffe Elisabeth
Published: December 2021

Abeillé and Godard (2007) describe a variety of Spanish whose complex predicates differ structurally
from the more familiar flat VP type of complex predicate common to other varieties of Spanish and
Romance. I present a verb cluster analysis of this variety which both captures these structural
differences, and at the same time preserves those features that are common across both construction
types. Coupled with a simple morphological treatment of affixation, this analysis predicts the range
of 'clitic climbing' facts. The parsimony of the affixation analysis is afforded by an alternative
approach to the constraints on reflexive affix distribution in Spanish complex predicates. I depart
radically from previous morpho-lexical approaches to the phenomenon, instead showing how the
constraints follow from independently motivated binding principles. This approach not only handles
more of the Spanish data, but also has the potential to provide a unified account of the phenomenon
across Romance.
The Big Mess Construction
Authors: Van Eynde Frank
Published: December 2021

There is a construction in English, exemplified by 'how long a bridge',
which is so irregular that it has been named the Big Mess Construction
(Berman 1974). This paper first sketches its main characteristics
and a treatment of the internal structure of the
noun phrase which serves as a background for the analysis. It
then presents three ways in which the Big Mess Construction
can be analysed; two of them are lexicalist and are shown
to be implausible; the third is constructivist and is argued to be
superior. In a next step, the discussion is extended to
two other types of constructions. The first concerns the
English adnominal reflexives, as in 'the children themselves',
and is shown to require a constructivist analysis which is similar but not
identical to the one for the Big Mess Construction.
The second concerns the combination of 'such' and 'what' with the indefinite
article, as in 'such a pleasure'. In spite of its obvious resemblance
with the Big Mess Construction this combination does not require a
constructivist analysis; instead, it fits the lexicalist mould of most of
the rest of HPSG.
The representation of syllable structure in HPSG
Authors: Tseng Jesse
Published: December 2021

This 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.
Dualist syntax
Authors: Wechsler Stephen
Published: December 2021

A dualist syntax has two components: (1) the lexicon, a structured set
of formatives ('words'); and (2) rules for combining those formatives into
utterances. This paper defends syntactic dualism against three
'monist' challenges.
First, evidence for lexical argument structure can be found in deverbal
nominalization, which preserves that structure systematically. Second,
words represent the smallest units for idiom formation and contextual polysemy
effects, which is expected on the dualist view but not if word meanings
are composed in the syntax. Third, the count/mass properties of nouns suggest
an interleaving of conceptual and grammatical information in semantic
composition.
Non-restrictive relative clauses, ellipsis and anaphora
Authors: Arnold Doug , Borsley Robert D
Published: December 2021

Non-restrictive relative clauses (NRRCs) can modify constituents which undergo
ˋpragmatic enrichment' when they appear in answers to questions. For example,
in an interchange like: ˋA: What did Jo think? B: That you should say nothing,
which is surprising.' What B says is surprising is that ˋJo thinks ...' On the
face of it, this might seem problematic for approaches to NRRCs which assume
ˋsyntactic integration' and to support an ˋorphan' analysis, where NRRCs are
combined with purely conceptual representations. In this paper we examine a
range of elliptical and anaphoric phenomena, and show that this conclusion is
misplaced. In fact, the phenomena argue strongly in favour of a syntactically
integrated analysis.
Reconsidering the coordinate structure constraint in Japanese and Korean: Syntactic constraint or pragmatic principle?
Authors: Kubota Yusuke , Lee Jungmee
Published: December 2021

Whether the Coordinate Structure Constraint (CSC) (Ross, 1967) is a
syntactic constraint has been discussed much in the literature. This
paper reconsiders this issue by drawing on evidence from Japanese and
Korean. Our examination of the CSC patterns in relative clauses in
the two languages reveals that a pragmatically-based approach along
the lines of Kehler (2002) predicts the relevant empirical patterns
straightforwardly whereas alternative syntactic approaches run into
many problems. We take these results to provide strong support for
the view that the CSC is a pragmatic principle rather than a syntactic
constraint.
Towards a grammar of preposition-noun combinations
Authors: Kiss Tibor
Published: December 2021

Preposition-noun combinations (PNCs) are compositional and
productive, but not fully regular. In school grammars and many
theoretical approaches, PNCs are neglected, but they have recently
been addressed in an HPSG analysis by Baldwin et al. (2006). After
discussing some basic properties of PNCs, we show that statistical
methods can be employed to prove that PNCs are indeed productive
and compositional, which again implies that PNCs should receive a
syntactic analysis. Such an analysis, however, is impeded by the
limited regularity of the construction. We will point out why adding
semantic conditions to syntactic schemata might be necessary but not
sufficient and turn then to a framework which allows the derivation of
syntactic (and semantic) generalizations from linguistic data without
taking recourse to introspective judgments.
Preposed negation in Danish
Authors: Ørsnes Bjarne
Published: December 2021

In Danish the base position of the negation and negated
quantifier phrases is between the subject and
the finite verb in embedded clauses. However, in embedded clauses
introduced by a non-veridical complementizer such as hvis (ˋif')
or om (ˋwhether') the negation and negated
quantifier phrases can also
appear between the complementizer and the subject. This phenomenon is
referred to as preposed negation. The paper investigates the structure
and semantics of this construction. It is argued that preposed
negation is no adjunction structure, but a special construction where
the negation element is a sister of the complementizer and the filler
of a filler-gap-structure. It is further argued that preposed negation is associated with negated
verum-focus of a clause lacking an (aboutness-) topic. The
negation of a verum predicate explains why preposed negation fails to license strong
negative polarity items and to rule out positive ones. The lack of a
topic explains why preposed negation is preferred with
non-referential subjects and with weak readings of
indefinite subjects and why preposed negation is incompatible with
topic-binding particles.The final section presents an HPSG-analysis of preposed
negation using Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS).
Korean comparative constructions: A constraint-based approach and computational implementation
Authors: Kim Jong-Bok , Yang Jaehyung , Song Sanghoun
Published: December 2021

The complexity of comparative constructions in each language has given challenges to both
theoretical and computational analyses. This paper first identifies types of comparative
constructions in Korean and discusses their main grammatical properties. It then builds a syntactic
parser couched upon the typed feature structure grammar, HPSG and proposes a context-dependent
interpretation for the comparison. To check the feasibility of the proposed analysis, we have
implemented the grammar into the existing Korean Resource Grammar. The results show us that the
grammar we have developed here is feasible enough to parse Korean comparative sentences and yield
proper semantic representations though further development is needed for a finer model for
contextual information.
Discontinuous negation in Hausa
Authors: Crysmann Berthold
Published: December 2021

Investigating the morphological and syntactic properties of discontinuous negative marking in Hausa,
I shall suggest a constructional approach involving edge inflection, accounting simultaneously for
the morphologically bound nature of the initial marker and its interaction with the TAM system,
haplology of the final marker, and wide scope over coordination. I will argue that the degree of
morphological integration of initial markers and haplology of final markers both favour an edge
feature approach over phrasal affixation.
On the syntax and semantics of vice versa
Authors: Chaves Rui P.
Published: December 2021

This work focuses on the syntax and semantics of the expression vice
versa, and shows that its syntactic distribution is much more flexible than
semantically related expressions. Although vice versa usually appears in
clausal coordinate environments, it can in principle occur in any other type
of construction. Second, it can occur as an embedded verb phrase or even
as a noun phrase, rather than as an adjunct. This suggests that vice versa
is a propositional anaphor that corresponds to a converse of a propositional
antecedent. Finally, although the predicates singled out to be interchanged
are usually nominal, they can in fact be of virtually any part of speech. I
argue that a possible account of the interpretation of vice versa lies at the
interface between logical form (with rich decompositional lexical semantics
along the lines of Pustejovsky (1995)), and pragmatics (drawing from independent
work by Hobbs (1990) and Kehler (2002)).
Coherence with adjectives in German
Authors: Cook Philippa , Ørsnes Bjarne
Published: December 2021

Coherence generally refers to a kind of predicate formation
where a verb forms a complex predicate with the head of its
infinitival complement. Adjectives taking infinitival complements have
also been shown to allow coherence, but the exact conditions for
coherence with adjectives appear not to have been addressed in the
literature. Based on a corpus-study (supplemented with
grammaticality judgements by native speakers) we show that adjectives
fall into three semantically and syntactically defined classes
correlating with their ability to construct coherently. Non-factive and
non-gradable adjectives allow coherence, factive and gradable adjectives
do not allow coherence and non-factive and gradable adjectives are
tolerated with coherence. On the basis of previous work on coherence in
German we argue that coherence allows the infinitival complement of a
verb or an adjective to be "split-up", so that the head and a dependent of this head
are associated with different information structural functions. In
this respect coherence patterns with extraction structures where the
extracted constituent has an information structural function different
from the constituent from which it is extracted. Following
literature on the information structural basis of extraction islands,
we show how the lack of coherence with factive adjectives follows from
their complements' being information structurally backgrounded, while the infinitival
complements of non-factive adjectives tend to a higher fusion with the
matrix clause. We also show that coherence is observed with
attributive adjectives as well, arguing that coherence is not a distinct
verbal property. Finally we provide an analysis of
coherence with adjectives within HPSG.
Positional expletives in Danish, German, and Yiddish
Authors: Müller Stefan , Ørsnes Bjarne
Published: December 2021

This paper deals with expletives that are inserted into clauses for structural reasons. We will
focus on the Germanic languages Danish, German, and Yiddish. In Danish and Yiddish expletives are
inserted in preverbal position in certain wh-clauses: In Danish such an insertion is
observed when the subject is locally extracted from an SVO configuration in non-assertive
clauses. In Yiddish wh-clauses are formed from a wh-phrase and a V2 clause. If no
element would be fronted in the embedded V2 clause, an expletive is inserted in non-assertive
clauses in order to meet the V3 requirement for embedded clauses. In
addition to embedded wh-clauses,
declarative V2 clauses also allow the insertion of an expletive. In Danish the expletive fills the
subject position and is not necessarily fronted. In German and Yiddish the expletive has to occur in
fronted position. In contrast to Danish and Yiddish, German does not
insert expletives into embedded wh-clauses. They are
inserted only into declarative V2 clauses in order to fulfill the V2 requirement without having to
front another constituent. In this paper we try to provide an account that captures the
commonalities between the three languages while being able to account for the differences.
Focus particles, secondary meanings, and Lexical Resource Semantics: The case of Japanese shika
Authors: Hasegawa Akio , Koenig Jean-Pierre
Published: December 2021

Japanese has two exclusive particles ˋshika' and ˋdake'. Although traditionally, both particles were
considered to be exclusive particles like ˋonly', a recent proposal claims that ˋshika' is an
exceptive particle like ˋeveryone except' to account for the necessary co-occurrence of the negative
suffix ˋna' and ˋshika'. We show that this negative suffix lacks two critical semantic properties of
ordinary logical negation: It is not downward entailing, nor does it license negative polarity
items. We show that both ˋshika' and ˋdake' are exclusive particles, but that ˋshika' encodes an
additional secondary meaning. The negative suffix only contributes to the sentence's secondary
meaning when it co-occurs with ˋshika'. We present an HPSG and LRS analysis that models the
co-occurrence of ˋshika' and the negative suffix ˋna', and their contribution to the sentence's
secondary meaning.
Linearization and its discontents
Authors: Levine Robert
Published: December 2021

Much recent work on coordination in the HPSG
framework seeks to deal with some of the most intractable issues this
phenomenon poses for a constraint-based phrase structure architecture
by appealing to the linearization mechanism introduced in
Reape 1993. The research in question utilizes the mismatch between
linear phonological sequences on the one hand and phrasal
configuration on the other to underwrite a particular interpretation
of ellipsis in which multiple structural objects with identical or
near-identical descriptions are mapped to a single dom-object
token. This mapping apparently allows a variety of problematic cases,
such as right node raising, dependent cluster coordination, and unlike
category coordination to be reinterpreted as instances of ordinary
coordination in which structurally present elements receive no
prosodic expression, creating the impression that strings which do not
correspond to constituents of the same category have nonetheless been
conjoined or disjoined. I argue in this paper that such
linearization-based ellipsis (LBE) analyses, though plausible when
confined to a narrow class of simplest-case data, prove untenable in
the face of data sets in which the LBE approach must account for the
interaction of nonconstituent coordination and quantification or
symmetric predication, symmetrical modification of nominal heads, and
a large and varied class of unlike category coordinations that do not
admit of any ellipsis-based solutions. I show in addition that various
objections offered in the LBE literature to categorial grammar
treatments of the problems posed by noncanonical coordinations do not
take into account techical resources available to CG which permit
straightforward and unproblematic solutions to these problems. One
must conclude that despite the general poplularity of LBE accounts of
conjunction, there is at the moment no satisfactory HPSG treatment of
noncanonical coordinations.
An HPSG approach to free relatives in Arabic
Authors: Alqurashi Abdulrahman
Published: December 2021

This paper describes free relative constructions in Modern Standard Arabic (henceforth, MSA) and
aims to provide an HPSG analysis for them. MSA has two types of free relative constructions. One,
which is introduced by the complementizer ʔallaði, looks just like a relative clause. The other,
which is introduced by the elements man and maa, which also appear to be complementizers, does not
look like a relative clause. Both types can be analysed in term of unary-branching structures (as
NPs consisting just of a CP). In ʔallaði free relatives, the NP and the value of SLASH can be
coindexed via the value of MOD on the CP. In man and maa free relatives, the NP and the value of
SLASH must be coindexed directly.
A left-branching grammar design for incremental parsing
Authors: Haugereid Petter , Morey Mathieu
Published: December 2021

This paper presents a left-branching constructionalist grammar design
where the phrase structure tree does not correspond to the
conventional constituent structure. The constituent structure is
rather reflected by embeddings on a feature STACK. The design is
compatible with incremental processing, as words are combined from
left to right, one by one, and it gives a simple account of long
distance dependencies, where the extracted element is assumed to be
dominated by the extraction site. It is motivated by psycholinguistic
findings.
A hybrid type of ellipsis in Romanian
Authors: Ionescu Emil
Published: December 2021

The paper presents a type of ellipsis similar to stripping and split conjuncts, yet irreducible to
either of them. One aim of the analysis is to document the existence of this distinct ellipsis type
within the class of constructions where the elided constituent is a verb or a verb phrase. It is
argued that the main generative strategies, namely, deletion and null anaphora cannot be applied to
this ellipsis type in order to account for it. Instead, the study shows that an approach which takes
the asymmetry syntax-semantics of this construction as basic is much more successful in explaining
the nature of this type of ellipsis. This alternative approach is the one offered by the HPSG
framework.
Past affix' selection of verbal stems
Authors: Koga Hiroki
Published: December 2021

We will observe which stem allomorph the affixes, the so-called ˋnon-past' affix, the past affix,
the imperative affix, the negative affix and the voice affix-like verbs, select between the longer
and the shorter in Japanese-Yanagawa dialect on the assumption that verbal lexemes may be associated
with more than one stem. Observing the phenomenon more closely, we found that the verbal stem forms
entertain default implicative relations in the stem dependency hierarchy. We will propose i) an
implemented analysis of the past affix and ii) an implementation of the allomorph selections by the
ˋnon-past' affix in Koga and Ono, 2010 as two examples.
Arabic relativization patterns: A unified HPSG analysis
Authors: Hahn Michael
Published: December 2021

Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic have several relativization patterns, including relative clauses with and without relativizers and adjectival modification patterns. Previous generative work has targeted several phenomena, but there is no analysis which covers all relativization patterns in any generative framework. We present an HPSG analysis that covers these phenomena in a uniform manner. Based on Doron and Reintges (2005), we show that the crosslinguistically unusual syntax of adjectival modifiers is a language-internally expected variant of participial modifiers as found in English. We also present the first HPSG analysis of Arabic broad subjects and argue that they are selected as specifiers, accounting for the similarities between broad subjects and ordinary subjects.
Multiple case marking as case copying: A unified approach to multiple nominative and accusative constructions in Korean
Authors: Ryu Byong-Rae
Published: December 2021

This paper presents a unified approach to multiple nominative and accusative constructions in
Korean. We identify 16 semantic relations holding between two consecutive NPs in multiple case
marking constructions, and propose each semantic relation as a licensing condition on double case
marking. We argue that the multiple case marking constructions are merely the sequences of double
case marking, which are formed by dextrosinistrally sequencing the pairs of the same-case marked NPs
of same or different type. Some appealing consequences of this proposal include a new comprehensive
classification of the sequences of same-case NPs and a straightforward account of some long standing
problems such as how the additional same-case NPs are licensed, and in what respects the multiple
nominative marking and the multiple accusative marking are alike and different from each other.
Why and how to differentiate complement raising from subject raising in Dutch
Authors: Van Eynde Frank , Augustinus Liesbeth
Published: December 2021

In Dutch V-final clauses the verbs tend to form a cluster in which the main verb is separated from
its syntactic arguments by one or more other verbs. In HPSG the link between the main verb and its
arguments is canonically modeled in terms of argument inheritance, also known as argument
composition or generalized raising. When applied to Dutch, this treatment yields a
number of problems, making incorrect predictions about the interaction with the binding principles
and the passive lexical rule. To repair them this paper proposes an alternative, in which subject
raising and complement raising are modeled in terms of different devices. More specifically, while
subject raising is modeled in terms of lexical constraints, as for English, complement raising is
modeled in terms of a more general constraint on headed phrases. This new constraint not only
accounts for complement raising out of verbal complements, it also deals with complement raising out
of adjectival and adpositional complements, as well as with complement raising out of PP adjuncts
and subject NPs. It is, hence, a rather powerful device. To prevent overgeneration we add a number
of constraints. For Dutch, the relevant constraints block complement raising out of CPs, V-initial
VPs and P-initial PPs. For English, the Empty COMPS Constraint is sufficient to block complement
raising entirely.
Focus case outside of Austronesian: An analysis of Kolyma Yukaghir
Authors: Zamaraeva Olga , Bender Emily M.
Published: December 2021

Case is traditionally approached as a lexical phenomenon in HPSG. The LinGO Grammar Matrix customization system, an HPSG-based grammar engineering toolkit and also a typological meta-resource, includes several options for case assignment, and one of them, ˋfocus case', assumes that case of the participants in basic clauses is handled via lexical rules rather than lexical entries. This phenomenon was previously only attributed to a group of Austronesian languages, and thus the focus case differed from all other case options in the Matrix which were attested for across language families. Our analysis of Kolyma Yukaghir, a nearly extinct language of North-Eastern Russia, shows that focus case can be successfully used outside of Austronesian family and therefore that the option is more universal than it was previously thought.