Towards a treatment of register phenomena in HPSG

Abstract

In this paper, we deal with register-driven variation from a probabilistic perspective, as proposed in Schäfer, Bildhauer, Pankratz, Müller (2022). We compare two approaches to analyse this variation within HPSG. On the one hand, we consider a multiple-grammar approach and combine it with the architecture proposed in the CoreGram project Müller (2015) - discussing its advantages and disadvantages. On the other hand, we take into account a single-grammar approach and argue that it appears to be superior due to its computational efficiency and cognitive plausibility.

Superlative ever in Dutch, French, German, and Spanish

“…We adopt the view that the social meaning of a linguistic entity is the knowledge of its typical/conventionalized association with particular communicative situations; a register is the subset of a language user's linguistic repertoire consistent with a particular communicative situation.5 For reasons of space, we cannot elaborate on the differences to other HPSG approaches such asWilcock (1999),Bender (2007), andMachicao y Priemer et al (2022).…”