Head-Specifier combination in HPSG

Now that the lexical entries of determiners and nouns have been clarified with re-spect to the attributes needed for the head-specifier combination, it is also necessary to examine the phrase structural constraints which license grammatical combina-tions of heads and specifiers.

First, in order to ensure that the specvalue of a specifier, which is a non-head daughter, is identified with the value of the head daughter, a principle called Spec-ified Principle (specP) is needed (cf. Pollard and Sag 1994: 50; Müller 2013a: 83;

a.o.).

(49) Specified Principle (specP)

If a non-head daughter in a headed structure bears a spec value different from none, it is token-identical to the synsem value of the head daughter.

Thus, thespecP can be formulated in form of an implicational constraint applying only to elements of typeheaded-structure, and by virtue of the inheritance ontology

52The reasons for this expansion will be clarified in detail in Section 4.6.

given in HPSG, also on its subtypes. As mentioned in (49), the value of the non-head daughter’s specattribute should be different fromnone, this is stated in the constraint with the negation symbol (¬), as (50) shows.

(50) Specified Principle (specP) headed-structure

→

⎡

⎢⎢

⎢

⎢⎣

hd-dtr|synsem ¹

nh-dtr|synsem|loc|cat|head|spec ¹

⎤

⎥⎥

⎥

⎥⎦

∧ 1 = ¬none

For the combination of a specifier with a head, in order to build a phrase of type head-specifier-structure, the Head-Specifier Schema (cf. Section 2.5.3) constrains that the synsem value of the non-head daughter must be identified with the one element⁵³ of the spr list of the head daughter. The spr value of the phrase is, thus, the value of the sprlist of the head minus thesynsemvalue of the non-head daughter (cf. (51)).

(51) ID-schema 2: Head-Specifier Schema

head-specifier-structure

→

⎡

⎢⎢

⎢

⎢⎢

⎢⎢

⎢

⎢⎢

⎢⎣

synsem|loc|cat|val|spr ¹ hd-dtr|synsem|loc|cat|val

⎡

⎢⎢

⎢⎢

⎢

⎣

spr ¹ ⊕⟨2⟩ comps⟨ ⟩

⎤

⎥⎥

⎥⎥

⎥

⎦ nh-dtr|synsem ²

⎤

⎥⎥

⎥

⎥⎥

⎥⎥

⎥

⎥⎥

⎥⎦

Furthermore, the Head-Specifier Schema constrains that the comps list of the head must be empty, such that the specifier is the last valence element which combines with the head, as it is shown in Figure 3.16.⁵⁴

The linearity conditions for head-specifier combinations were discussed in detail in Section 2.5.4. Hence, I am just going to repeat the involved LP-rule for the sake of completeness. The rule in (52), and more precisely its formulation in (53), constrains that thephonvalue of the non-head daughter, i.e. the specifier, is placed before the phon value of the head daughter.

53This holds, of course, for languages which have only one specifier. In these cases, the list of the specifier has been proposed to be a singleton (cf. Przepiórkowski, 1999: 18). For languages, for which it is assumed to have more than one specifier (normally more than one determiner), e.g. Greek, Scandinavian, Romanian (cf. Alexiadou, 2014), the spr list can be discharged recursively.

54See Section 2.5.3 for a discussion on this topic.

NP

Gewinn der WM

win of the World Championship Figure 3.16: Head-specifier structure (52) LP-rule 2: Head – Specifier

specifier < head (53) Specifier < Head

⎡⎢

Three further principles which have to be mentioned are the HFP, the ValP (cf. (48) and (50), respectively, in Section 2.5.5), and the SemP (cf. (34) in Sec-tion 3.2.3.3). For the HFP, since thehead-specifier-structure is a subtype of headed-structure, it holds that the head value of the head-daughter is projected to the phrase. According to the ValP, theval values of the head daughter are projected to the phrase.

The SemP as formulated in (34) in Section 3.2.3.3 offers two possibilities to account for the head-specifier combination in accordance to the type hierarchy in Figure 3.8 (cf. Section 3.1.4).

• Firstly, it would be possible to treat specifiers like arguments and expand the first clause of the SemP to the typehead-non-adjunct-structure(cf. (54a) below).

• Secondly, we could treat specifiers like adjuncts and expand the second clause of the SemP to the type head-non-argument-structure (cf. (54b) below).

The first solution fails since the denotation of nouns must be included into the denotation of its determiner. This was shown with respect to examples (44) and (45) in Section 3.3. The noun, thus, must be interpreted in the scope of the determiner and the plain concatenation of rels would not yield this as a result.

The second proposal also fails. This is due to the ind value of the specifier. As was explained in Section 3.3.1 with respect to example (48), possessive pronouns have anindvalue which is not structure-shared with the noun. Therefore, it is not possible to project the completecontvalue of the specifier. As these two proposals fail to account for the semantic composition of head-specifier combinations, I am arguing that a third clause needs to be added to the SemP in order to account for these facts (cf. (54c)): The structure sharing of the contvalue is divided into two parts, the ind value is projected from the head daughter, and the rels value is projected from the non-head daughter.

(54) Semantic Principle (SemP) (4^th preliminary version) For phrases of typeheaded-structure,

a. if the headed phrase is of type head-argument-structure:

i. its cont|ind value is structure-shared with the cont|ind value of the head daughter and,

ii. its cont|rels value is the concatenation of the rels lists of the head daughter and the non-head daughter;

b. if the headed phrase is of type head-adjunct-structure:

i. its contvalue is structure-shared with the cont value of the non-head daughter.

c. if the headed phrase is of type head-specifier-structure:

i. its cont|indvalue is structure-shared with the cont|indvalue of the head daughter and,

ii. its cont|rels value is structure-shared with the cont|rels value of the non-head daughter.

(55) Semantic Principle (SemP) (4^th preliminary version)

headed-structure

→

nh-dtr|synsem|loc|cont[rels ³] head-argument-structure

hd-dtr|synsem|loc|cont[ind ¹] nh-dtr|synsem|loc|cont[rels ²] head-specifier-structure

Thus, summarising the notion of specifier with Figure 3.17, as has been done for the head, arguments and adjuncts, it can be said that the head-specifier relation is also a horizontal relation in which the head determines by virtue of the HFP the morphosyntactic properties of the phrase. In comparison to the head-argument and the head-adjunct relations, the head-specifier relation represents a mutual selection in which the head selects the specifier (through the spr attribute), and the specifier the head (through the spec attribute). Moreover, the semantics of the head is restricted by the specifier by incorporating the indand rels value of the head into the rels list of the specifier. The semantics of the phrase follows straightforwardly from the new clause of the SemP, the ind value of the phrase

is structure shared with the one of the head, and the rels list of the phrase is structure shared with the one of the specifier.

X phrase

V

Im Dokument NP-Arguments in NPs (Seite 142-147)