Underspecified Semantics in HPSG

Richter, Frank; Sailer, Manfred

doi:10.1007/978-94-011-4231-1_5

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…The feature synsem was introduced to enforce locality of selection in the feature geometry, and local separates information that is locally relevant from information that plays a role in non-local dependencies. Since the respective phenomena are not discussed in this paper, I omit these features in the rest of the paper.See Müller (2007b) and Richter & Sailer (2009) for an argument against adopting more recent feature geometries such as, for instance, that suggested in Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2007a).…”

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confidence: 99%

Persian complex predicates and the limits of inheritance-based analyses

Müller

2009

J. Ling.

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Persian complex predicates pose an interesting challenge for theoretical linguistics since they have both word-like and phrase-like properties. For example, they can feed derivational processes, but they are also separable by the future auxiliary or the negation prefix.Various proposals have been made in the literature to capture the nature of Persian complex predicates, among them analyses that treat them as purely phrasal or purely lexical combinations. Mixed analyses that analyze them as words by default and as phrases in the non-default case have also been suggested.In this paper, I show that theories that rely exclusively on the classification of patterns in inheritance hierarchies cannot account for the facts in an insightful way unless they are augmented by transformations or some similar device. I then show that a lexical account together with appropriate grammar rules and an argument composition analysis of the future auxiliary has none of the shortcomings that classification-based analyses have and that it can account for both the phrasal and the word-like properties of Persian complex predicates.[1] I thank

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confidence: 99%

Persian complex predicates and the limits of inheritance-based analyses

Müller

2009

J. Ling.

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“…Thus the use of hole semantics requires little new machinery. Either the unification-based (Richter & Sailer 1997), the lambda-based approach (Blackburn & Bos 2000, Bos, 2001, or linear logic (van Genabith et al 1999) can be adopted.…”

Section: Dealing With Ambiguitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Computational Semantics

2023

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“…I omit such labels for exposition purposes only. See also Ginzburg & Sag (2000), Frank & Reyle (1995), Richter & Sailer (1999) and Sag (2010b).…”

Section: Basicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conjunction, cumulation and respectively readings

Chaves

2012

J. Ling.

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So-called respectively readings have posed serious challenges for theories of syntax and semantics. Sentences likeGeorge and Martha respectively denounced and were denounced by the governor(McCawley 1998) show that although the conjoined verbal expressions share the same syntactic subject, they do not predicate that subject in the same way; George (not Martha) denounced the governor, and Martha (but not George) was denounced by the governor. Postal (1998: 160–163) and Gawron & Kehler (2004: 193–194) show that this phenomenon poses problems for contemporary theories of grammar and argue that it is particularly acute for theories where subcategorization and predication are linked via unification. As these authors note, the problem is even more severe in respectively readings involving filler–gap constructions. In this paper I argue that the severity of these problems has been overstated and that the data do not entail any special dissociation between predication, subcategorization, or extraction. In this paper I propose an account which is fully compatible with unification-based theories of grammar. Gawron & Kehler (2004) propose an account of respectively phenomena which covers a remarkably wide range of cases. That approach relies on aRespfoperator, which it stipulated to be optionally overt. However, I argue that this analysis is problematic because there are significant semantic differences between respectively readings with and without an overt realization of ‘respectively’. Rather, the data suggest that respectively readings may be special cases of more general phenomena which happen to create interpretations that are compatible with the semantics of the adverbrespectively. This explains why respectively readings can arise without the adverb, and does not require us to posit a disconnect between predication and subcategorization. In fact, a sentence with a respectively reading will not differ in syntactic or semantic structure from sentences without such a reading.

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Underspecified Semantics in HPSG

Cited by 7 publications

References 3 publications

Persian complex predicates and the limits of inheritance-based analyses

Persian complex predicates and the limits of inheritance-based analyses

Computational Semantics

Conjunction, cumulation and respectively readings

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