Raising, inversion and agreement in modern Hebrew

2015 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-179
Author(s):  
NURIT MELNIK
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
The Other ◽  
Phrase Structure Grammar ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Embedded Clause ◽  
Long Distance Agreement ◽  
Subject Raising

This paper focuses on the interaction between raising, subject–verb inversion and agreement in Modern Hebrew. It identifies, alongside ‘standard’ (i.e., English-like) subject-to-subject raising, two additional patterns where the embedded subject appears post-verbally. In one, the raising predicate exhibits long-distance agreement with the embedded subject, while in the other, a colloquial variant, it is marked with impersonal (3sm) agreement. The choice between the three raising constructions in the language is shown to be solely dependent on properties of the embedded clause. The data are discussed and analyzed against a background of typological and theoretical work on raising. The analysis, cast in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), builds on research on raising, selectional locality, agreement, subjecthood and information structure, as well as verb-initial constructions in Modern Hebrew.

Raising and long-distance agreement in Passamaquoddy: A unified analysis

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-405
Author(s):  
PHILIP S. LESOURD
Keyword(s):  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Phrase Structure Grammar ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Local Principle ◽  
Long Distance Agreement

This article presents an analysis of two constructions in the Eastern Algonquian language Passamaquoddy in which the position of the object of a verb of cognition (‘know’, ‘believe’, ‘remember’, ‘wonder about’, ‘suspect’) is linked, either by apparent raising or by apparent long-distance agreement, to a position within a clausal complement to the verb. The latter position may be arbitrarily deeply embedded. The analysis developed here, formulated in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, demonstrates that the two constructions in fact represent alternative realizations of identical argument structures for the verbs in question and that the apparent long-distance dependencies involved can be accounted for in terms of a purely local principle of argument selection.

What participles are a mixture of

Linguistics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Van Eynde
Keyword(s):  
Phrase Structure ◽  
The Other ◽  
Second Step ◽  
Phrase Structure Grammar ◽  
Mixed Nature

Abstract It is commonly assumed that participles show a mixture of verbal and adjectival properties, but the issue of how this mixed nature can best be captured is anything but settled. Analyses range from the purely adjectival to the purely verbal with various shades in between. This lack of consensus is at least partly due to the fact that participles are used in a variety of ways and that an analysis which fits one of them is not necessarily equally plausible for the other. In an effort to overcome the resulting fragmentation this paper proposes an analysis that covers all uses of the participles, from the adnominal over the predicative to the free adjunct uses, including also the nominalized ones. To keep it feasible we focus on one language, namely Dutch. With the help of a treebank we first identify the uses of the Dutch participles and describe their properties in informal terms. In a second step we provide an analysis in terms of the notation of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. A key property of the analysis is the differentiation between core uses and grammaticalized uses. The treatment of the latter is influenced by insights from Grammaticalization Theory.

Sign-Based Construction Grammar: A guided tour

2015 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 194-217
Author(s):  
FRANK VAN EYNDE
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Construction Grammar ◽  
The Other ◽  
Phrase Structure Grammar ◽  
Diachronic Syntax ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Guided Tour ◽  
Further Development

Sign-Based Construction Grammar (sbcg) is, on the one hand, a formalized version of Berkeley Construction Grammar (bcg), and, on the other hand, a further development of constructionist Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (hpsg). The volume edited by Hans Boas and Ivan Sag is the first book length presentation of the framework. Its centerpiece is a 130-page synopsis of the theory by Ivan Sag. The other contributions to the volume provide background, justification, case studies, an extension to diachronic syntax and a presentation of the FrameNet Constructicon. This review gives a guided tour of the framework, explaining its central notions and assumptions, as well as the notation in which they are cast. It also compares the sbcg framework with other types of Construction Grammar and with hpsg. The case studies are summarized and briefly evaluated.

Zwicky on heads

1987 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Present Status ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
The Other ◽  
Phrase Structure Grammar ◽  
Dependency Grammar ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Interesting Development

An interesting development in the last decade or so has been the increasing use that theoretical linguists have made of the notion ‘head’ – or rather, in order not to beg the question, of notions to which they have given the name ‘head’. The term has been around for a long time in linguistics, of course – for example Bloomfield uses it in relation to endocentric constructions (1933: 195), where the head is the daughter constituent which has the same distribution as the mother. Before that, Sweet had used ‘head-word’ to refer to any word to which another is subordinate (1891: 16, quoted in Matthews, 1981: 165). However, theoretical linguists made very little use of the term, or of the constellation of associated concepts, until quite recently. Its present status is due largely to work on X-bar syntax dating from Chomsky (1970), and especially to its recent manifestation in Generalised Phrase Structure Grammar (Gazdar & Pullum, 1981; Gazdar et al., 1985)–and even more so in the ‘head-driven’ variant of this (Pollard, 1985). But the improved status of ‘head’ is also due to some extent to the renewed interest in dependency grammar (Anderson, 1971, 1977; Matthews, 1981; Atkinson, et al, 1982; Hudson, 1984; Nichols, 1986). All these treatments agree not only in using the term ‘head’, but also in using it to refer to the element in some construction to which all the other parts of that construction are (in some sense) subordinate.

Representing argument structure

2016 ◽  
Vol 53 (04) ◽  
pp. 701-750 ◽  
Author(s):  
LIVNAT HERZIG SHEINFUX ◽  
NURIT MELNIK ◽  
SHULY WINTNER
Keyword(s):  
Argument Structure ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Phrase Structure Grammar ◽  
Additional Challenge ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Engineering Effort ◽  
The Right ◽  
Grammar Engineering

Existing approaches to the representation of argument structure in grammar tend to focus either on semantics or on syntax. Our goal in this paper is to strike the right balance between the two levels by proposing an analysis that maintains the independence of the syntactic and semantic aspects of argument structure, and, at the same time, captures the interplay between the two levels. Our proposal is set in the context of the development of a large-scale grammar of Modern Hebrew within the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Consequently, an additional challenge it faces is to reconcile two conflicting desiderata: to be both linguistically coherentandrealistic in terms of the grammar engineering effort. We present a novel representation of argument structure that is fully implemented in HPSG, and demonstrate its many benefits to the coherence of our Hebrew grammar. We also highlight the additional dimensions of linguistic generalization that our proposal provides, which we believe are also applicable to grammars of other languages.

scholarly journals Towards an analysis of the adverbial use of German interrogative was(ˋwhat')

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anke Holler
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Information ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Initial Position ◽  
The Other ◽  
Phrase Structure Grammar ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Construction Type ◽  
The One

The paper discusses the so-called adverbial use of the wh-pronoun was (ˋwhat'), which establishes a non-standard interrogative construction type in German. It argues that the adverbial use of was (ˋwhat') is based on the lexical properties of a categorically deficient pronoun was (ˋwhat'), which bears a causal meaning. In addition, adverbial was (ˋwhat') differs from canonical argument was (ˋwhat') as it is analyzed as a functor which is generated in clause-initial position. By means of empirical facts mainly provided by d'Avis (2001) it is shown that was (ˋwhat') behaves ambivalently regarding the wh-property: On the one hand, was (ˋwhat') can introduce an interrogative clause, but on the other hand it cannot license wh-phrases in situ. While formally analyzing the data against the background of existing accounts on wh-interrogatives couched in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, an analysis is developed that separates two pieces of information to keep track of the wh-information percolating in an interrogative clause. Whereas the WH-value models wh-fronting and pied-piping phenomena, the QUE value links syntactic and semantic information and thus keeps track of wh-phrases in-situ.

On Phrase Structure and Brain Responses: A Comment on Bahlmann, Gunter, and Friederici (2006)

2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (10) ◽  
pp. 1581-1583 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Corballis
Keyword(s):  
Phrase Structure ◽  
The Other ◽  
Syntactic Processing ◽  
Phrase Structure Grammar ◽  
Brain Potentials ◽  
General Issue ◽  
Brain Responses

Bahlmann et al. (2006) reported an experiment on event-related brain potentials of sequences of syllables obeying two rules, one defined by AnBn and the other by (AB)n, where the As and Bs are different classes of syllables. They interpreted their findings on the assumption that AnBn are parsed according a center-embedded phrase-structure grammar. In fact, such sequences are much more likely to be parsed in terms of the repetition of element types, without reference to phrase structure. This raises a general issue about attempting to study syntactic processing independently of semantics.

Syntactic, semantic and information structures of floating quantifiers

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryo Otoguro ◽  
Liselotte Snijders
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
The Other ◽  
Information Structures ◽  
Recent Proposal ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Floating Quantifiers ◽  
The One

Quantifiers canonically attach to nouns or noun phrases as modifiers to specify the amount or number of the entity expressed by the noun. However, it has been observed that quantifiers can be positioned outside of the noun phrase. These so-called floating quantifiers (FQs) exhibit intriguing syntactic and semantic characteristics. On the one hand, they appear to have a closerelationship with a noun; semantically they quantify a noun in the same way as non-floating quantifiers, and quite often they exhibit agreement with the noun. On the other hand, their phrase structure distribution is very similar to that of VP-adverbs. In this paper, we argue that the distribution of FQs is constrained not purely by syntax, but also by information structure. We show that FQs play a focus role whereas modified nouns are reference-oriented topic expressions. Building upon Dalrymple and Nikolaeva’s (2011) recent proposal, we formulate the interaction between syntactic, semantic and information structure features of FQs within LFG’s projection architecture.

The information structure of Danish grammar constructions

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-164
Author(s):  
Patrizia Paggio
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Formal Grammar ◽  
Phrase Structure Grammar ◽  
Feature Structures ◽  
Typed Feature Structures ◽  
Type Hierarchy

This paper addresses the issue of how information structure can be accounted for in a formal grammar of Danish. Three information structure features – topic, focus and background – are discussed, and it is shown how they are instantiated in a number of different grammatical constructions from a corpus of spoken Danish. Prosodic, syntactic and information structure constraints characterising the various constructions are represented as typed feature structures following Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), and the constructions themselves are ordered in a type hierarchy. The proposed approach modifies and extends earlier HPSG-based accounts by integrating information structure as a dimension of phrasal and clausal grammar constructions.

scholarly journals Theoretical Implications of Directionally Asymmetric Transparency

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Gleim
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Consonant Harmony ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Long Distance Agreement

Transparent segments have been a well known challenge for accounts of patterns of long distance agreement, such as vowel and consonant harmony. Two standard ways to account for transparency are autosegmental feature spreading with underspecification (e.g. Kiparsky 1981; Steriade 1987) and Agreement by Correspondence (ABC; Walker 2000; Walker & Rose 2004; Hansson 2001). Both, however, fail to derive the multiple instances of transparency encountered in Tsilhqút'í­n (Cook 1993; 2013). Here, non-retracted dorsals act both as transparent and as opaque to the process of vowel retraction, depending on which side of the trigger, a retracted sibilant, they are located. On the other hand, both retracted and non-retracted dorsals are transparent in sibilant harmony, in which sibilants are forced to agree in retraction. I propose a superset approach that combines feature spreading and underspecification with ABC: All dorsals are transparent in sibilant harmony, because they are outside the correspondence relation. At the first step of the derivation, non-retracted dorsals are not specified for retraction, allowing them to be transparent to regressive retraction. At a later step, they are negatively specified and hence able to block progressive retraction.

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