HPSG Research Articles

On the Complexity of RSRL

In this paper we present a computability and a complexity result on Relational Speciate Reentrant Logic (RSRL). RSRL is a description logic designed to formalise the linguistic framework and theory Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. We show here that given an RSRL-formula and a finite RSRL-interpretation it is in general not decidable if the formula is true in the given interpretation by reduction to Post Correspondence Problems. For so-called chainless RSRL, a semantically weaker version in which the expressive power of RSRL is significantly reduced, we show that if a class of finite structures is definable in chainless RSRL it is decidable by a Turing machine polynomially time bounded in the size of the input structures.

Any questions left? Review of Ginzburg & Sag's Interrogative investigations

For better or worse, linguistics is rife with frameworks, each with its own ethos. Two important aspects of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar's are: (1) the search for an explicit and exhaustive account of the intricate syntactic and semantic facts that constitute one's grammar and (2) the hypothesis that general/universal and specific aspects of one's grammar are not qualitatively distinct. This book stands as a superb example of this ethos. It illustrates the fecundity of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (henceforth, HPSG) as a framework and advances our knowledge of the syntax and semantics of interrogatives. It is the most explicit description of the semantics and syntax of any area of English syntax of which this reviewer is aware. It thus sets up a healthy empirical benchmark for other theories of interrogatives. The sixty pages of appendices that detail the grammar discussed in the book and its almost complete implementation in the current version of the English Resource Grammar attest to this empirical bent. Any future theory will have to match it in accuracy before any metatheoretical issues (e.g. simplicity or explanatory adequacy) can be meaningfully discussed. Its precision and comprehensiveness will also, hopefully, lead to descriptions of unbounded dependencies and clause-types in other languages that are orders of magnitude more detailed than those currently available. Ginzburg & Sag's (G&S's) book also illustrates how possibly universal principles (such as the requirement that head-daughters and mothers of a local tree share information) and construction-specific requirements (such as the fact that the scope of

Minor Adpositions in Dutch

Since the introduction of the X-bar principles in syntax it is commonly assumed that adpositions are complement-taking heads of PPs. While this treatment is well motivated for many adpositions in many languages, there are some which - in some of their uses - would be better treated as nonhead daughters of verbal or nominal projections. These exceptional adpositions, which I will henceforth call 'minor', are the central topic of the article: I will provide criteria for their identification, propose a detailed treatment of the constructions which contain them, and address the question of whether they form a natural class. The wider significance of the analysis consists in the evidence which it provides against the wide-spread practice of treating function words as heads of phrasal projections. This practice, which is mainly associated with Chomsky (1986) and which has led to the postulation of a plethora of functional projections, including CP, DetP, and InflP, is not well suited to a treatment of the minor adpositions and should be replaced with an alternative in which these adpositions are treated as functor daughters in verbal or nominal projections. The analysis draws on various types of descriptive and formal grammar, as well as on corpus-based research, but the format in which it is cast is the constraint-based lexicalist one of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar; see Pollard and Sag (1994). A brief introduction to the HPSG notation is provided in section 2.2. The exemplification will be based on Dutch, but at various points comparisons will be made with English and German.

Against ConjP

It has been widely assumed within Principles and Parameters theory that coordinate structures are Conjunction Phrases, with the first conjunct the specifier, the conjunction the head, and the second conjunct the complement. However, this analysis has not been assumed in other frameworks such as Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar and Categorial Grammar. There is considerable evidence that proponents of other frameworks have been right to be sceptical. Among other things, the distribution of coordinate structures, coordinate structures containing more than two conjuncts, and coordinate structures in which the conjuncts are words pose serious problems for the analysis. It has sometimes been suggested that the analysis receives some support from cases of unbalanced coordination where just one conjunct triggers agreement on some external head or bears the case assigned by an external head. However, a close look suggests that there is no support here for the analysis.

Token Dependency Semantics and the Paratactic Analysis of Intensional Constructions

This article introduces Token Dependency Semantics (TDS), a surface‐oriented and token‐based framework for compositional truth‐conditional semantics. It is motivated by Davidson's ‘paratactic’ analysis of semantic intensionality (‘On Saying That’, 1968, Synthèse19: 130–146), which has been much discussed in philosophy. This is the first fully‐fledged formal implementation of Davidson's proposal. Operator‐argument structure and scope are captured by means of relations among tokens. Intensional constituent tokens represent ‘propositional’ contents directly. They serve as arguments to the words introducing intensional contexts, rather than being ‘ordinary’ constituents. The treatment of de re readings involves the use of functions (‘anchors’) assigning entities to argument positions of lexical tokens. Quantifiers are thereby allowed to bind argument places on content tokens. This gives us a simple underspecification‐based account of scope ambiguity. The TDS framework is applied to indirect speech reports, mental attitude sentences, control verbs, and modal and agent‐relative sentence adverbs in English. This semantics is compatible with a traditional view of syntax. Here, it is integrated into a Head‐driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The result is a straightforward and ontologically parsimonious analysis of truth‐conditional meaning and semantic intensionality.

A Lexical Approach to English Floating Quantifiers

This paper investigates how the syntactic and semantic characteristics of floating quantifiers (FQ) in English can be explained within the framework of the Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Previous analyses treat FQs either basically as NP quantifiers (Postal 1974, Maling 1976, Sportiche 1988, Mccawley 1998), or as VP quantifiers that are syntactically and semantically distinct from NP quantifiers (Dowty & Brodie 1984). In contrast, this paper proposes an analysis in which FQs are base-generated VP modifiers as in Dowty & Brodie, but their logical (or semantic) contributions are made analogous to that of quantificational determiners, through a precise lexical description of FQs that specifies the information on "storage" and "retrieval" of the quantifier meaning. The proposed analysis is "lexical" in its nature in the sense that the syntactic and semantic properties concerning distribution and scope interaction are encoded as part of the lexical information that the FQs have.

Generate and Repair Machine Translation

We propose Generate and Repair Machine Translation (GRMT), a constraint–based approach to machine translation that focuses on accurate translation output. GRMT performs the translation by generating a Translation Candidate (TC), verifying the syntax and semantics of the TC and repairing the TC when required. GRMT comprises three modules: Analysis Lite Machine Translation (ALMT), Translation Candidate Evaluation (TCE) and Repair and Iterate (RI). The key features of GRMT are simplicity, modularity, extendibility, and multilinguality.An English–Thai translation system has been implemented to illustrate the performance of GRMT. The system has been developed and run under SWI–Prolog 3.2.8. The English and Thai grammars have been developed based on Head–Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and implemented on the Attribute Logic Engine (ALE). GRMT was tested to generate the translations for a number of sentences/phrases. Examples are provided throughout the article to illustrate how GRMT performs the translation process.

현대 독일어 제2형 분사의 형용사 전환에 대한 제약

This paper addresses the issue of constraints on the conversion of the participle II in German, proposing a constraint-based lexical semantic approach. I argue against the widely accepted syntactic view which is based on the dichotomous distinction of intransitive verbs, which has been advanced by the Unaccusative Hypothesis [Perlmutter (1978)]. Several arguments are also given against the semantic view which is based on some aspectual notions such as ''telicity'', ''transformativity'' or ''terminativity''. The crucial constraints on the conversion of the participle II in German, it is argued, is instead two lexical semantic entailments, movement with a definite change of location and affectedness. These and other lexical semantic entailments in the sense of Dowty (1991) are encoded into the multiple inheritance type hierarchy of qfpsoa. The proposal made in this paper is based on the multiple inheritance hierarchy which is envisaged in a recent framework of head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. (Chungnam National University)

Slavic in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (review)

Reviewed by: Slavic in head-driven phrase structure grammar ed. by Robert D. Borsley, Adam Przepiórkowski Natalie Sciarini-Gourianova Slavic in head-driven phrase structure grammar. Ed. by Robert D. Borsley and Adam Przepiórkowski. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 1999. Pp. 345. Cloth $64.95, paper $24.95. Recent years have shown a rapid splash of activity in the frames of formal approaches to Slavic languages. Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG), like most other theories of natural language, was initially developed largely on the basis of English. A few studies applying this type of grammar to quite different types of languages began to appear in the 1980s; works published in the 1990s show that distinctive word order and morphological properties of Slavic languages can be quite a challenge for structural analysis. The present volume, which examines a variety of phenomena from Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Russian, Bulgarian, and Czech, is a welcome addition to the field; its contributors try to provide an explicit framework for grammatical description, supported by experimental research. Traditionally, the majority of work within any formal approach to language has been concerned with syntax. This volume is not an exception. Tania Avgustinova, Wojciech Skut, and Hans Uszkoreit examine diathesis phenomena in a range of Slavic languages. They argue that HPSG is capable of coping with crosslinguistic similarities. As a result, a formal cross-Slavic account of valency alternations is proposed. Małgorzata Marciniak aims at formulating an HPSG binding theory for Polish. In this respect she discusses middle-distance binding. She seeks to provide a comprehensive account of this phenomenon and concentrates on the formalization of Principles A and B of the binding theory. Adam Przepiórkowski examines the nature of the complement-adjunct distinction. He shows that alleged configurational tests are at odds with linguists’ views on this dichotomy and argues that his result adds weight to recent HPSG approaches to it. Syntax is not the only matter of concern in the presented works. The editors of the volume seem to have found a proper balance in the discussion. The majority of contributors look into less frequently studied topics within HPSG and try to go beyond pure syntax, dealing with important problems in phonological, syntactico-morphological, and complex syntactico-semantic interface. In this respect, Tilman N. Höhle proposes a model for phonology. He suggests that the relations between phonology and physical phonetics can be more precisely understood from the HPSG point of view, supporting his statement with data from Russian, German, and Miwok. Gerald Penn is interested in the interaction of syntactic, prosodic, and discourse effects. He argues for a more basic reform to HPSG’s notion of constituency. Robert D. Borsley discusses weak auxiliaries, certain complex verb forms, and certain complementizers in Polish. He suggests that HPSG and, in particular, certain recent proposals within the framework, allow a more satisfactory analysis of these data. Stephen Wechsler and Larisa Zlatić state that in certain contexts involving dative and instrumental cases in Serbo-Croatian, case must be morphologically realized; as a result some special undeclined nouns cannot be used. Anna Kupść deals with the status of the Polish reflexive marker ‘self’, showing its linear realization in terms of the order domains approach. Frank Richter and Manfred Sailer discuss negative concord (NC) in Polish. Understanding n-words as identifiers, rather than quantifiers, they talk of the distribution of n-words in terms of their theory of collocations. Adam Przepiórkowsky and Anna Kupść also argue that NC is subject to both syntactic and semantic island constraints and show that Italian data confirm this result. All the papers demonstrate a thorough and accurate approach to the studied topics and provide a very interesting outline of phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic issues found in the Slavic languages. No doubt, the volume will be found most interesting as a guide and an inspiration for further research in the HPSG framework. [End Page 348] Natalie Sciarini-Gourianova Abraham Baldwin School, Guilford, CT Copyright © 2002 Linguistic Society of America

Feature Distribution in Swedish Noun Phrases (review)

Reviewed by: Feature distribution in Swedish noun phrases by Kersti Börjars Asya Pereltsvaig Feature distribution in Swedish noun phrases. By Kersti Börjars. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Pp. xiii, 290. Paper £19.99. This book provides a theoretical account of Swedish noun phrases, with special emphasis on syntactic structure and feature distribution. The analysis is couched within the framework of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG); however, the analysis relies [End Page 346] heavily on empirical observations, and many of the author’s claims can be translated into other theoretical frameworks. Furthermore, the author prefaces her analysis by a brief introduction of the basics of HPSG (section 5.1.2). Börjars focuses on two aspects of Swedish noun phrase syntax: the status of the definite ending and the headedness of the phrase. She concludes that the definite ending does not project its own phrase in syntax; moreover, she argues against the DP-analysis and in favor of the NP-analysis. The book opens with a short introductory chapter in which B introduces the issues to be investigated throughout the book. Then, in Ch. 2 she presents empirical observations about the distribution and properties of various elements in the prenominal field, including determiners and modifiers. Furthermore, B presents some previous studies of these elements and concludes that there is no need to distinguish between as many classes of elements as has been previously proposed. On the basis of distributional tests, B argues that Swedish counterparts of ‘all’, ‘few’, ‘only’, and ‘such’ are members of the syntactic class of adjectives. Ch. 3 addresses the question of the nature of the definite ending. Upon an examination of previous analyses, B turns to the discussion of the distinction between clitics and affixes and applies the tests to the Swedish definite ending. The behavior of this ending is then compared to that of the genitive ending -s, which has often been assigned clitic status in Swedish. Finally, the definite ending is compared to the so-called enclitic affixes in other languages, including Balkan languages and other Scandinavian languages. On the basis of this discussion, B draws the conclusion that the definite ending in Swedish is neither a clitic nor a syntactic determiner, but is rather an affix which does not head its own projection in syntax. Ch. 4 investigates what the head of a noun phrase is. Having established a set of criteria for headedness, based on earlier work by other investigators, B proceeds to evaluate the arguments in favor of the DP-hypothesis and the alternative NP-hypothesis. She then concludes that Swedish provides no evidence in favor of the DP-hypothesis; therefore noun phrases in Swedish can be analyzed as DPs only if the headedness is assumed to be universal. However, B rejects this assumption and decides in favor of the NP-hypothesis. Chs. 5 and 6 lay out B’s analysis of Swedish definite and indefinite noun phrases, respectively, within the HPSG framework. One of the reasons for the choice of framework is that HPSG allows for an analysis where selection is not restricted to heads. According to B, if the assumptions about the universality of headedness and the restriction of selection to heads are both rejected, there is no reason to analyze Swedish noun phrases as DPs. Rather, an alternative NP-analysis is both possible and plausible. Overall, the author succeeds in making both the (sometimes quite intricate) data and the argumentation accessible to her readers. Thus, the book is bound to make a strong impact on the debate on the structure of noun phrases both in Scandinavian languages and crosslinguistically. Asya Pereltsvaig University of Tromsø Copyright © 2002 Linguistic Society of America

Negation without Head-Movement

This paper presents a lexicalist analysis of negation inFrench and English. In both languages, negation in finite clausesis grammatically distinguished from constituent negation. Lexicalidiosyncrasy motivates treating finite negation as a verbalcomplement, while constituent negation is treated in terms of afamiliar modifier-head construction. General principles orderinglexical and phrasal heads ensure that negation (the adverbs not and pas) follows the finite verb (the finite auxiliaryverb in English), while only constituent negation appearspreverbally. Our constraint-based account, cast within theframework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), provides a viable alternative (with broader coverage, fewer devices andsimpler principles) to analyses based on head movement,which seek to explain the syntax of negation and adverbial positions in terms of the interaction ofmorphological properties, verb movement, and functionalprojections.

Group adjectives

AbstractThis paper attempts a comparative syntactic study of group adjectives in Danish, English and Modern Greek. The central problem with group adjectives is to account for the contrast between their seemingly argumental behaviour and their inability to introduce new referents into the discourse. We propose a novel analysis whereby group adjectives form a weakly lexical structure with their head noun and modify the first argument of the argument structure of the head noun while the argument itself remains unexpressed. If this analysis is right, it lends support to the representation of argument structure as a level which is simultaneously distinct from the representation of syntactic valency and participates in valency saturation phenomena. The framework is that of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG).

On Expressing Lexical Generalizations in HPSG

This paper investigates the status of the lexicon and the possibilities for expressing lexical generalizations in the paradigm of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). We illustrate that the architecture readily supports the use of implicational principles to express generalizations over a class of word objects. A second kind of lexical generalizations expressing relations between classes of words is often expressed in terms of lexical rules. We show how lexical rules can be integrated into the formal setup for HPSG developed by King (1989, 1994), investigate a lexical rule specification language allowing the linguist to only specify those properties which are supposed to differ between the related classes, and define how this lexical rule specification language is interpreted. We thereby provide a formalization of lexical rules as used in HPSG.

Studies in Contemporary Phrase Structure Grammar (review)

Reviewed by: Studies in contemporary phrase structure grammar ed. by Robert D. Levine, Georgia M. Green Michael A. Covington Studies in contemporary phrase structure grammar. Ed. by Robert D. Levine and Georgia M. Green. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. iv, 335. This book contains seven papers on aspects of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) preceded by a fast-paced introduction by the editors to the current version of HPSG (1–38) in which a number of quite different-looking notations are reconciled. A bit more explicitness would be welcome in places, e.g. examples 2 and 3 on pp. 3–4 actually encode different, small parts of example 1, and the connection among the three is not obvious. Likewise, it was not quite obvious to me how example 13 on p. 11 encodes the whole of tree 15, as the authors seem to indicate, rather than just the root of it. The account of equi and raising on p. 14 would have benefited from a couple of example sentences. However, perhaps this introduction was not meant for newcomers. On pp. 28–35 the editors give a good overview of the rest of the volume. Two of the papers analyze Japanese causatives and reach opposite conclusions. The question is whether causatives (such as tabesase ‘cause to eat’ from tabe ‘eat’) are syntactically complex structures or single words generated in the lexicon. In favor of the lexical account are the facts that the form of -(s)ase is morphologically conditioned; verb reduplication, honorification, and other processes treat tabesase (etc.) as a unit; and some causatives have undergone semantic drift. In favor of a nonlexical analysis: Adverbs can have scope over just the inner verb in a causative; a causative verb can be used with a noncausative gerundive, which takes on a causative sense, as if one -(s)ase were modifying two verbs; and there are some signs that binding and quantifier scope can ‘see into’ causatives. Christopher D. Manning, Ivan Sag, and Masayo Iida (39–79) argue that the lexicalist hypothesis is correct and that the resulting HPSG structure is rich enough to account for the putative counterevidence. Their key tactic is to move the two-level structure of a causative into its argument list, which is visible to quantifier scope and binding. Takao Gunji (119–60) takes the opposite tack, giving causatives a two-level structure in the syntax though not in the morphology or phonology. His crucial move is to make morphology a separate structural level from syntax. The other five papers are ‘A syntax and semantics for purposive adjuncts in HPSG’ (Michael J. R. Johnston, 80–118); ‘Modal flip and partial verb phrase fronting in German’ (Kathryn L. Baker, 161–98); ‘A lexical comment on a syntactic topic’ (i.e. topicalization, Kazuhiko Fukushima, 199–222); ‘Agreement and the syntax-morphology interface in HPSG’ (Andreas Kathol, 223–74); and ‘Partial VP and split NP topicalization in German’ (Erhard W. Hinrichs and Tsuneko Nakazawa, 275–332). All of them attack linguistic problems whose significance is not confined to HPSG. Michael A. Covington University of Georgia Copyright © 2001 Linguistic Society of America

Head of a Projection

In recent work in generative grammar, one finds two approaches concerning the projection of heads onto phrases. On the one hand, in the Govemment-Binding/Minimalist Program tradition it has commonly been assumed that a projection inherits all the properties of its head and nothing else, a principle that Brody (1998) refers to as Uniqueness. On the other hand, in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and its predecessors it is explicitly assumed that features of a complement of X can project to XP, so a projection of X ends up richer than its head. Therefore, whether Uniqueness holds between a projection and its head is an issue that needs to be resolved. So far, within minimalism only a conceptual argument has been presented in favor of Uniqueness, that of Chomsky's (1995) theory of bare phrase structure. In this squib I present two additional empirical arguments in favor of Uniqueness, drawn from well-known properties of causative constructions and noun incorporation.

Case realization and identity

Languages with case concord sometimes require that at least one case-concord element in the NP be inflected for case, while others may be uninflected. Focusing primarily on Serbo-Croatian, we review some variants of this case realization requirement in different languages and propose a unified account. This analysis makes crucial use of reentrancy (cp. structure-sharing) in attribute-value matrices, a key explanatory tool of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar.

Directional serial verb constructions in Thai

Directional Serial Verb Constructions (Directional SVCs), which are a subset of Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) in Thai and involve motion-related verbs, are studied in this paper. According to two syntactic tests, two phrase structural schemata are involved in Thai Directional SVCs, including a recursive VP-over-VP structure and a complementation structure. Thai Directional SVCs also exhibit a dissociation between constituent structure and linear order. With this distinctive syntactic structure, Thai Directional SVCs are not reduceable to previously described SVCs. Nevertheless, within Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, the rich featural specifications of heads and the mechanisms available for the percolation of specific head properties in a default interpretation of the Head Feature Principle allow for a straightforward model of Thai Directional SVCs.

Deutsche Syntax deklarativ: Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar für das Deutsche. By Stefan Müller. (Linguistische Arbeiten, 394.) Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999. Pp. xiii, 486. Paper. DM 186.00.

Stefan Müller has written an extensive study of a large range of German constructions from the perspective of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG). For a theoretical work, it is notable for its scale, for its extensive use of current material from corpora, and for its welcome attention to the descriptive literature. Furthermore, the analyses can be tested on Müller's prolog implementation of HPSG, which runs at http://www.dfki.de/~stefan/. This is a very extensive fragment of German, involving thousands of words of different classes, raising and control verbs, passives, verb particle constructions, the “third“ construction, modal flip (Oberfeldumstellung), several sorts of relative clauses, extraposition, complex fronting, semifree word order in the Mittelfeld, scope ambiguities, and more. It is unusual to find this all in a single implementation, and the work is unique in being made available on the web. Müller's web page also contains errata for this book and examples.

On resultative predicates and clauses: parallels between Korean and English

This paper looks at resultative constructions in Korean and English, and shows that their basic features follow from general properties of predication and argument saturation. In English and Korean, resultative events can be expressed either with a secondary predicate or subordinate clause. English (but not Korean) has a third type of resultative construction, the ‘ECM’ type, which occupies a sort of middle ground between predicative and clausal resultatives. Apparent differences between the two languages arise when English resultatives of one type are compared to Korean resultatives of the other type. But when the same types are compared across languages, the apparent differences disappear. The analysis is formulated in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG).

Formalizing formality: an analysis of register variation in Sinhala

Variation in language on the basis of formality (register variation) is often neglected both in grammatical descriptions and in sociolinguistic analyses. I demonstrate here that in Sinhala, and perhaps in other diglossic languages, register variation in syntax cannot be ignored. In a Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) analysis based on a corpus of naturally occurring Sinhala texts, I propose an analysis of register variation in which the syntax of all observed registers is accounted for within a single grammar. I further explain how the approach to register variation developed here can be extended to other types of sociolinguistic variation.