Studies in Contemporary Phrase Structure Grammar

This book explores a wide variety of theoretically central issues in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), a major theory of syntactic representation which is becoming increasingly dominant, particularly in the domain of natural language computation. HPSG is a strongly lexicon-driven theory, like several others on the current scene, but unlike the others it also relies heavily on an explicit assignment of linguistic objects to membership in a hierarchically organized network of types, where constraints associated with any given type are inherited by all of its subtypes. This theoretical architecture allows HPSG considerable flexibility within the confines of a highly restrictive, mathematically explicit formalism, requiring no derivational machinery and invoking only a single level of syntactic representation. The separate chapters consider a variety of problematic phenomena in German, Japanese and English and suggest important extensions of, and revisions to, the current picture of HPSG.

• This book contains a concise overview of one of the two major frameworks for natural language analysis • The individual chapters provide detailed empirical analyses of a very wide variety of languages • Most of the material, though designed primarily for specialists, is also accessible to advanced undergraduate students with only a modest amount of extra background

Introduction Georgia M. Green and Robert D. Levine; 1. The lexical integrity of Japanese causatives Christopher Manning, Ivan Sag and Masayo Iida; 2. A syntax and semantics for purposive adjuncts in HPSG Michael Johnston; 3. On lexicalist treatments of Japanese causatives Takao Gunji; 4. ‘Modal flip’ and partial Verb Phrase fronting in German Kathryn L. Baker; 5. A lexical comment on a syntactic topic Kazuhiko Fukushima; 6. Agreement and the Syntax-Morphology Interface in HPSG Andreas Kathol; 7. Partial VP and split NP topicalization in German: an HPSG analysisErhard W. Hinrichs and Tsuneko Nakazawa.