Summer School on Constraint-based Grammar,
Trondheim, Norway, 6.-11. August 2001
Course description
Largely untouched by the intense discussion of phenomena involving
long-distance and, more recently, middle-distance dependencies, there
appears to be a general agreement across frameworks on the strictly
local nature of certain central grammatical relations such as category
selection, head-dependent agreement, case and other government
phenomena, or semantic role assignment. The frameworks differ with
respect to how this locality restriction is encoded, be it by an
explicit "Locality Principle" or the feature geometry assumed in HPSG
or implicit to the f-structure constraints expressed in LFG theories.
Contrasting with this general belief, some investigators recently
pointed out a number of phenomena in which traditionally local
properties of embedded constituents apparently have to be visible
outside of the local head domain these constituents occur in. For
example, work on case assignment in German by Meurers and in Polish by
Przepiorkowski, on English tag questions by Flickinger and Bender and
`tough' complement structure by Levine, all point to the persistence
of information about clause-internal constituents at higher levels of
phrase structure configuration.
On the basis of a clarification of the different ways in which
locality considerations are effective in the various frameworks, the
crucial questions we envisage this course addressing include
- What are the constituents whose specifications must be available
outside the clauses they appear in?
- What is the nature of the clause-internal information which must
be allowed to be accessible outside the clause?
We believe this topic to be particularly appropriate for a general
discussion since the question how the locality of grammatical
relations is reflected in the architecture and how the apparent
exceptions can be integrated into this picture clearly involves
theoretical and empirical aspects which are relevant independent of
the particular formalization.
The course will start out with a short introduction of the traditional
HPSG paradigm (Pollard & Sag 1994) and how the issue of locality of
grammatical relations has been addressed in it. The main part of the
course then is dedicated to the various empirical phenomena which have
been argued in the literature to violate the mentioned locality.
For questions or comments regarding this page, please contact: Detmar Meurers
Last modified: Thu Sep 13 12:55:36 EDT 2001