Phrase Structure Grammar
2.5 Rules, principles, constraints
2.5.5 Grammatical principles
In (46), theinivalues are not relevant. The LP-rule constraining the linearity of the head and its specifier only refers to the syntactic categories, and not to internal attribute-value pairs of them. The result is the concatenation of the specifier, i.e. of the nh-dtr’s phon value, with the head, i.e. the hd-dtr’s phon value.
Furthermore, the ID-schema in (38) specifies that the hd-dtr’s comps list must be empty in order for the two elements to be concatenated.
Finally, the interplay of ID-schemata and LP-rules give as the only possible grammatical structure the one in (41a), as it was intended to be.
2.5.5 Grammatical principles
Some generalisations must be regarded as having a broader coverage than others. In this respect, we could say that lexical entries – as treated in Section 2.5.1 – are the most idiosyncratic elements in our system, while some LP-rules (cf. Section 2.5.4) are to a great extent a matter of language specific (or language-family specific) constraints. Besides this, there are some other regularities that seem to be almost universal in nature. One of these regularities concerns the relation of a head and its phrase in endocentric structures, that is of a N0 and its NP, or of a V0 and its VP. In derivational approaches this is provided by X-theory and the so-called Projection Principle (cf. Chomsky 1981: 29ff, Chomsky 1995: 51f). In HPSG, this relation is guaranteed not only by the Head Feature Principle (HFP), but also by
the Valence Principle (ValP).75
The HFP ensures that a part of the information of an AVM in a phrase of type headed-structure or in its subtypes (cf. Figure 2.11) is shared between the mother and the hd-dtr. According to Pollard and Sag (1994: 34), the HFP is formulated as (47).
(47) Head Feature Principle (HFP)
The head value of any headed phrase is structure-shared with the head value of the head daughter.
The HFP can also be formulated in form of an implicational constraint apply-ing only to elements of type headed-structure (and by virtue of inheritance on its subtypes too), as shown in (48).
(48) Head Feature Principle (HFP) headed-structure
→
⎡
⎢⎢
⎢
⎢⎣
synsem|loc|cat|head 1
hd-dtr|synsem|loc|cat|head 1
⎤
⎥⎥
⎥
⎥⎦
The attributes contained in head, as far as we have seen, say something about the part of speech, for verbs about the verb form (cf. (19)), and for nouns about the case (cf. (20)), in addition, the head attribute ini says something about the position of the head in relation to its arguments. All this information is important for the whole phrase and must be visible for the element which takes the phrase as an argument. Let us exemplify this fact by the phrase in Figure 2.13, here repeated as 2.15 and expanded by the needed features.
First, we have here a concatenation of two NPs: NPiiwith its headGewinn‘win’, and NPi with its headWM ‘World Championship’. The head attribute of NPi has a value of typenoun, containing information aboutcasegenitive(gen), andini+.
The combination of the head noun with the determiner is licensed by means of the Head-Specifier Schema, and since the type head-specifier-structure is a subtype of headed-structure the HFP holds. Therefore, the head value of the head noun N0i and the head value of NPi is structure-shared, i.e. identical.
75The Head Feature Principle can be regarded as a reformulation of theHead Feature Convention (HFC) from GPSG (cf. Gazdar et al., 1985: 50f), and the Valence Principle (cf. Pollard and Sag, 1994: 348) is a reformulation of the Subcategorisation Principle (from Pollard and Sag, 1987: 11, 71) which has its roots in the argument cancellation of CG (cf. Pollard and Sag, 1987: 10f).
NPii
comps⟨NP[casegen]⟩
⎤⎥⎥⎥
Figure 2.15: Illustration of Head Feature Principle
Second, since the N0iiand NPiare concatenated by virtue of the Head-Complement Schema – with N0ii being the head, and NPi being the argument – the head at-tributes of NPimust be visible. Namely, N0iiis looking for a noun phrase in genitive case (cf. compslist of N0ii). In addition, theheadvalue of N0ii is projected to (or more accurately structure-shared with) the further tree nodes (cf. N′ii and NPii) by virtue of HFP.
The second principle mentioned above – the ValP – describes the way to satisfy the arguments of a head and how the list of not-satisfied arguments is passed on to the next projection. In order to satisfy this principle – in comparison to the Subcategorisation Principle (subcatP) formulated by Pollard and Sag (1987: 71) – three different lists must be considered: subj, comps, and spr (cf. Pollard and Sag, 1994: 348). The subcatP, conversely, considers only one list, the subcat list, which concentrates all arguments of the previous mentioned lists.76
According to Pollard and Sag (1994: 348), the ValP can be formulated as follows:
(49) Valence Principle (ValP)
In a headed phrase, for each valence feature f, the f value of the head daughter is the concatenation of the phrase’s f value with the list of synsem values of thef-dtrs values.
Valence features (f) are subj, comps, and spr. This formulation implies the following for objects of type headed-structure:
1. if we are dealing with the combination of a head with its subject, then the value of the valence featuresubj of the mother will be the same as the value of the valence feature subjof the hd-dtrminus the value of thesynsemof the nh-dtr (i.e. the saturated argument); and
76As far as all arguments are kept into one single list, i.e. the subcat list, the subcatP in contrast to the ValP is formulated by Pollard and Sag (1994: 34) as follows:
(i) Subcategorisation Principle (subcatP):
In a headed phrase (i.e. a phrasal sign whosedtrsvalue is of sorthead-struc [headed-structure; MyP]), thesubcat value of the head daughter is the concatenation of the phrase’ssubcatlist with the list (in order of increasing obliqueness) of synsemvalues of the complement daughters.
2. if we are dealing with the combination of a head with one of its complements, then the value of the valence feature compsof the mother will be the same as the value of the valence featurecompsof the hd-dtr minus the value of the synsemof the nh-dtr (i.e. the saturated argument); and
3. if we are dealing with the combination of a head with its specifier, then the value of the valence featurespr of the mother will be the same as the value of the valence featurespr of the hd-dtr minus the value of the synsem of the nh-dtr (i.e. the saturated specifier); but
4. if we are dealing with the combination of a head with a non-argument, then the value of the valence features subj, comps, and spr of the mother will be the same as the respective values of the valence feature of the hd-dtr. Taking our ID-schemata and our preliminary type hierarchy for sign (cf. Fig-ure 2.11) from Section 2.5.3, a formalisation of the ValP needs a disjunctive con-straint expressed using the logical disjunction∨, describing what happens with the valence features for each subtype of headed-structure (cf. for a similar reasoning Przepiórkowski 1999: 20).77 The formalisation can be given as shown in (50).
Another Principle which has already been referred to in Section 2.5.3 is the Immediate Dominance Principle (IDP). The IDP was thought to be the HPSG counterpart of X-theory. That is to say, the IDP constitutes “[. . . ] the ‘phrase structure rule’ component of HPSG [. . . ]” (Przepiórkowski, 1999: 20). It consists – similar to the ValP – of constraints which are disjunctively combined. The single disjuncts of the principle are the ID-schemata, which constraint possible ways of immediate constituency of phrases.78 Thus, in Pollard and Sag (1994: 38), the IDP is assumed to be a universal principle constraining phrase structures from which every language makes a selection of the needed ID-schemata. Some of the ID-schemata have been already shown in Section 2.5.3. The IDP formulated by Pollard and Sag (1994: 399)79 considers only phrases of typeheaded-structure, but
77Sag (1997: 439f) offers a shorter formalisation of the ValP by means of defaults. I have chosen here a more specific formalisation, since defaults have not been introduced here.
78In Pollard and Sag (1987: 147ff), ID-schemata are called grammar rules.
79For a formalised version of the IDP of Pollard and Sag, see Richter (2000: 432f). The IDP is formulated by Pollard and Sag (1994: 399) as follows:
(i) Immediate Dominance Principle (IDP): Every headed phrase must satisfy exactly one of the ID schemata.
(50) Valence Principle (ValP)
headed-structure
→
⎡
⎢⎢
⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎢
⎣
synsem|loc|cat|val|subj 1
hd-dtr|synsem|loc|cat|val|subj 1 ⊕⟨2⟩ nh-dtr|synsem 2
head-subject-structure
⎤
⎥⎥
⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎥
⎦
∨
⎡⎢
⎢⎢
⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎢
⎢⎣
synsem|loc|cat|val|comps 1
hd-dtr|synsem|loc|cat|val|comps 1 ⊕⟨2⟩ nh-dtr|synsem 2
head-complement-structure
⎤⎥
⎥⎥
⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎥
⎥⎦
∨
⎡
⎢⎢
⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎢
⎣
synsem|loc|cat|val|spr 1
hd-dtr|synsem|loc|cat|val|spr 1 ⊕⟨2⟩ nh-dtr|synsem 2
head-specifier-structure
⎤
⎥⎥
⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎥
⎦
∨
⎡⎢
⎢⎢
⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎣
synsem|loc|cat|val 1
hd-dtr|synsem|loc|cat|val 1 nh-dtr|synsem 2
head-adjunct-structure
⎤⎥
⎥⎥
⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎦
as mentioned in Footnote 63 also phrases of typenon-headed-structureare assumed in the literature. Based on Przepiórkowski (1999: 20), I am assuming here that the IDP must be a principle for the type phrase and not only for the type headed-structure, and be formalised as in (51).
(51) Immediate Dominance Principle (IDP)
phrase
→
ID-schema 1∨
ID-schema 2
∨
ID-schema 3
∨
. . .
The restriction given by the IDP is actually very weak and almost trivial since it lists all schemata which are founded in possible languages only reflecting what a cross-linguistic type hierarchy would say. Originally, the IDP was thought as a phrase structural component consisting of few schemata, e.g. the six schemata listed in Footnote 64 (cf. Pollard and Sag, 1994: 38), but given the structural complexity of languages – regarded cross-linguistically – the accuracy of such a principle has been challenged.