7.2 The Anchor
7.2.2 The Introduction of the Anchor
In this section, it is shown how the anchor is introduced that establishes the relation between a relative clause (canonical or extraposed) and its antecedent. The anchor will consist of the index and the semantic predicate of the nominal, and it is introduced by the determiner in order to be passed up the tree.
I employ a feature calledANCHORS (ANC), which belongs to the nonlocal attributes.7 As in Pollard and Sag (1994), objects of sort nonlocal, which are the values of the featureNON
-6See Van Eynde (2003b, 2006) for a development of a complex sort hierarchy of the sort marking.
7I adopt this idea from Kiss (2005), who also employs a feature calledANCHORS. However, the value of hisANCHORSfeature is different. Kiss takes it to be a set of index-handle pairs. The latter take the form of a tuple consisting of a nominal’s index and the corresponding handle.
CHAPTER 7. A NEW THEORY OF GENERALIZED MODIFICATION 164
LOCAL, have the two attributes INHERITED (INH) andTO-BIND. In theSLASH mechanism, theINHERITED feature is employed to introduce nonlocal dependencies at the gap site and pass them up the tree, while the TO-BIND feature is used to bind the nonlocal dependency at the filler. Both of these features take objects of type nonlocal1 as their value. In Pollard and Sag (1994), this type has the attributes SLASH, REL, and QUE, and I now add the at-tributeANCHORS. The sort hierarchy and appropriateness conditions of the types nonlocal and nonlocal1 are shown in (251).8
(251) a. Appropriateness conditions of the sort nonlocal:
nonlocal
INHERITED nonlocal1
TO-BIND nonlocal1
b. Appropriateness conditions of the sort nonlocal1:
nonlocal1
SLASH set(local)
REL set(ref)
QUE set(npro)
ANCHORS set(local)
I assume that theANCHORS attribute takes a set of elements of type local as its value.9 According to the feature architecture of Pollard and Sag (1994), elements of type local con-tain the features CATEGORY and CONTENT. However, I adopt a proposal by Crysmann (2013), whose analysis of relative clause and complement clause extraposition, based on Kiss (2005), also employs an anchor mechanism. Crysmann splits the type local into two types, index-local and full-local. As shown in (252), CONTENT is the feature appropriate for the common supertype local, while CATEGORY is a feature only for the subtype full-local. On the one hand, this partitioning allows Crysmann to model both relative clause and complement clause extraposition by employing one and the same feature, whose value is a set of local elements.10 On the other hand, he can account for the differences between the two mechanisms in that in the case of relative clause extraposition, the anchor consists of an element of type index-local, i.e., only semantic content information, while in the case of complement clause extraposition, it is of type full-local, i.e., it contains full
syntactico-8The assumption of this architecture for extraposition constructions is also based on Crysmann (2013), who draws on Keller (1995). The latter introduced the nonlocal featureEXTRAto model extraposition processes as a nonlocal dependency. See Chapter 5.3 for a review of all major analyses of relative clause extraposition proposed in HPSG.
9This idea stems from Crysmann (2013).
10Hence, all rightward-oriented displacement processes are modeled by means of one and the same feature, which Crysmann callsEXinstead ofANCHORS, while all leftward extraction processes are modeled using the standard HPSG nonlocal featureSLASH.
semantic information (see Chapter 5.3.4 for a full review of Crysmann’s analysis).11 (252) Sort hierarchy and appropriateness conditions of the sort local:
local
CONTENTcontent
index-local full-local
CATEGORYcategory
Recall that the relationship between an extraposed relative clause and its head is regarded to be quasi-anaphoric (see Chapter 5.3.3 and Kiss (2005)). The relative clause mainly needs access to the referential index introduced by its antecedent. More precisely, the index of the relative pronoun must be identified with the index of the head noun. Furthermore, as will be shown in Sections 7.3.1 and 7.3.4 below, the semantic predicate of the nominal is additionally needed in order to ensure that the semantic contribution of the relative clause and the semantic contribution of its antecedent are intersectively conjoined. For that reason, Crysmann’s proposal is adopted in the present analysis of relative clause extraposition, and the value of the ANCHORS attribute is a set of elements of type index-local. Its feature
CONTENTcontains both, the INDEXand theMAINvalue (i.e., the semantic predicate) of the nominal.
The next question is: how is the anchor introduced? In contrast to Kiss (2005), in whose theory the anchor is introduced by the noun, I assume that it is the noun’s determiner that introduces the anchor. One important argument for this analysis is that relative clauses can even modify elements that lack an overt noun, as in the German example diejenige, die dort steht (‘the+that who there stands’), or in the English example some/many that were drunk (see Section 7.3.5 below for an account of these cases). Furthermore, certain determiners in German enforce the presence of a relative clause (*diejenige Frau (‘the+that woman’) vs. diejenige Frau die dort steht (‘the+that woman who there stands’)). Finally, although proper names can neither be modified by a restrictive relative clause (in English *Paris that I love, or in German *Berlin, das ich liebe (‘Berlin that I love’)), nor can they be specified by a determiner (*the Paris, *das Berlin (‘the Berlin’)), a restrictive relative clause can be adjoined when a determiner is present, as in the Paris that I love and das Berlin, das ich liebe (‘the Berlin that I love’). These cases suggest that there is a close dependency between the determiner and the relative clause.12 It is therefore natural to assume that the determiner is
11Since Crysmann (2013) uses the semantic framework of MRS (Minimal Recursion Semantics), the fea-tures appropriate for his sort content differ from the ones employed in LRS. See Chapter 5.3.4 for the details.
However, the effects of both theories are the same.
12This observation goes back to Smith (1964), Vergnaud (1974), Kayne (1994), Schmitt (2000), and Sauer-land (2003), among others, who take the relative clause to be selected by the determiner.
CHAPTER 7. A NEW THEORY OF GENERALIZED MODIFICATION 166 the element responsible for introducing the anchor and hence for licensing a relative clause.13 Since a determiner selects the nominal via its SELECT feature, it is straightforward to specify a lexical constraint on the determiner which introduces the anchor of the nominal, whether the nominal is overt or elided. The constraint is formulated for all words whose
HEADvalue is of type determiner (det), as shown in (253).
(253) Anchor Introduction Constraint:
"
word
SS|LOC|CAT|HEAD det
#
⇒
SS
LOC|CAT|HEAD|SELECT|LOC|CONT 1
NLOC|INH|ANCHORS
"
index-local
CONT 1
#!
Every determiner thus introduces into its ANCHORS set an element of type index-local whose CONTENT value is structure-shared with the CONTENT value of the nominal it se-lects. Note, however, that the element in the ANCHORS set is only optionally introduced, which is indicated by the parentheses. This is in order to account for the difference between determiners that enforce the presence of a relative clause (e.g., derjenige/diejenige/dasjenige (‘the+that’)) and determiners that do not require one (e.g., the, a, some in English, and der/die/das (‘the’), ein/eine/ein (‘a’) in German). The introduction of the anchor is oblig-atory for the former, in which case the lexical entry of the determiner is specified to have a nonempty set as itsANCHORSvalue, as illustrated in (254a). In the latter case, the introduc-tion of the anchor is opintroduc-tional, and nothing further needs to be specified in the lexical entry of such a determiner (254b). As will be shown below, if an anchor is introduced, it must be picked up by a relative clause. That means that a determiner like the or a only introduces an anchor if the nominal it selects is also modified by a relative clause. If the nominal is not modified by a relative clause, the determiner has an emptyANCHORS set.
(254) a. Sketch of a lexical entry of a determiner (diejenige (‘the+that’)) with an obligatory relative clause:
word
PHON
D
diejenige E
SS
"
LOC|CAT|HEAD det
NLOC|INH|ANCHORS non-empty-set
#
b. Sketch of a lexical entry of a determiner (der (‘the’)) that optionally licenses a relative clause:
word
PHON
D der
E
SS|LOC|CAT|HEAD det
13The reader might wonder at this point how an anchor will be introduced, i.e., how a relative clause will be licensed, in cases where there are no determiners, for example in plural NPs and mass nouns. This issue will be addressed in the section to follow.
The tree structure in (255) illustrates the mechanism of the introduction of the anchor for the NP a film. The determiner selects theSYNSEM value of the nominal it combines with and introduces the nominal’s CONTENT value (i.e., the INDEX and MAIN values) as an anchor into itsANCHORS set.
(255) Sketch of the introduction of the anchor:
NP
D
SS
LOC|CAT|HEAD
det
SELECT 1
NLOC|INH|ANCHORS
index-local
CONT 2
INDEX 3 MAIN 4
a
N
SS 1|LOC|CONT 2
INDEX 3 MAIN 4
film
What needs to be achieved next is that the anchor is passed up the tree so that it can eventually be picked up by a relative clause. This is taken care of in the following section.