Representing Referential Properties of Nominals

Abstract

This paper concerns grammatical phenomena sensitive to certain classes of nominal forms, i.e., those that encode different kinds of referential properties of the nominal. We propose a grammar component for defining and picking out such semantic classes of nominal forms within typed feature structure formalisms such as the one used in HPSG, thus aiming at standardizing the representation of such phenomena. The grammar component includes four semantic features associated with the discourse referent of a nominal, i.e., cognitive status, specificity, partitivity, and whether the nominal has a universal interpretation or not. The proposed grammar component reduces to an assumed minimum a relatively large set of features that have already been proposed in analyses of the kind of phenomena at focus here, and it is hypothesized that parts of the structure are likely to be shared among grammars for different languages.

Grammar Customization

“…The customization system allows us to define affixes in order to get the form of these words right, but does not yet have any provision to encode the semantic contributions of the affixes. In fact, we believe that definiteness (and more generally, information about the discourse status of referents) is best encoded as semantic feature, whether it is introduced by a separate word (determiner) or an affix (Borthen and Haugereid 2005;Bender and Goss-Grubbs 2008), and intend to add support for such marking to the system in the future. The tense/aspect library performed fine, with the exception of Hausa, where tense and aspect are closely connected to mood.…”

Semantic representations of syntactically marked discourse status in crosslinguistic perspective

“…Their intuition is that the syntactic constraints restrict the distribution of certain forms based on the highest discourse status they are compatible with, rather than on the actual discourse status of the referent they are used to evoke in a given context. The cognitive status hierarchy, as we adopt it from Borthen and Haugereid (2005) is shown in Fig 1. 3…”

“…In this paper we have explored the construction of semantic representations for a variety of forms of referring expressions. Building on Borthen and Haugereid (2005)'s proposal to treat cognitive status as a semantic feature within HPSG, we have developed representations for definite, demonstrative and null NPs, and sketched means of arriving at them compositionally.…”

“…In this paper, we discuss the compositional construction of semantic representations reflecting discourse status across a range of phenomena. Borthen and Haugereid (2005) propose COG-ST ('cognitive-status') 1 as a feature on the syntax-semantics interface to handle phenomena associated with definiteness. We explore how their approach leads to cross-linguistically unified treatments of demonstratives, overt pronouns and null anaphora as well.…”

“…We explore cross-linguistic harmonization of these representations, to promote interoperability and reusability of linguistic analyses. We follow Borthen and Haugereid (2005) in positing COG-ST ('cognitive status') as a feature on the syntax-semantics interface to handle phenomena associated with definiteness. Our proposal helps to unify the treatments of definiteness markers, demonstratives, overt pronouns and null anaphora across languages.…”