Constraint-Based Lexica

Abstract

As the field of generative linguistics has developed, the lexicon has taken on an increasingly important role in the description of both idiosyncratic and regular properties of language. Always viewed as a natural home for exceptions, the lexicon was given relatively little work in the early years of transformational grammar. Then Chomsky proposed in 1970 (Chomsky, 1970) that similarities in the structure of deverbal noun phrases and sentences could be expressed in terms of a lexical relationship between the verb and its nominalization. Jackendoff (1975) characterized further lexical regularities in both morphology and semantics, and Bresnan (1976, 1982) pioneered the development of a syntactic framework (Lexical Functional Grammar) in which central grammatical phenomena such as passivization could be explained within the lexicon. A parallel line of work by Gazdar (1981) called Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar sought to provide a nontransformational syntactic framework, by employing metarules over a context-free grammar. Gazdar et al. (1985) constrained the power of those metarules by restricting them to lexically-headed phrase structure rules. Pollard and Sag (1987, 1994) built on the work in GPSG, outlining the more radically lexicalist framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), abandoning construction-specific phrase structure rules in favor of a small number of rule schemata interacting with a more richly articulated lexicon to capture relevant syntactic generalizations. As a well-known and widely used constraint-based grammar formalism1 HPSG will serve us well in this chapter by providing a precise linguistic framework within which we can organize the relevant data and examine the technical devices available for analysis of that data. For those who are not familiar with the notation, we first provide a brief introduction to this framework.