Complex event compounds in Danish - An HPSG approach1

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of Complex Event Compounds (CECs) in Danish within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Complex Event Compounds are morphological objects with several syntactic properties and so they pose a challenge to any theory adhering to lexicalism, i.e. to the assumption that syntactic operations can not make reference to the internal structure of words. Furthermore, Danish synthetic compounds are interesting inasmuch as existing generative analyses of English compounding fail to account for the Danish data. The first part of the paper discusses the dominant syntactic properties of CECs and it is shown how lexicality can be defined relative to level of representation while exploiting the existing resources of hpsg. The second part explores the relation between a possible CEC and the syntactic subcategorization frame of the verbal head and it presents an analysis of the constraints governing the formation of CECs in Danish. Finally it is shown how compounding in general and the constraints governing the formation of Danish CECs can be represented in a lexical type hierarchy based on multiple monotonic inheritance, i.e. a hierarchical organization of lexical knowledge where subtypes inherit all the information associated with the higher types of which they are instances.