Robert Levine and Detmar Meurers:
Locality of Grammatical Relations
795K/820, Spring 2003
Course Description
The idea of constituent structure plays a central role in most current
syntactic frameworks, and with it the idea that it is possible and
useful to define constituents as modular local domains in which to
express grammatical relations and constraints. From category selection
and semantic role assignment, via case and other government phenomena,
to agreement phenomena, there is a general consensus that most
grammatical relations can and should be expressed in terms of local
trees or the domain of a single head-projection. Apart from the
linguistic issue as such, it is also relevant from a computational and
psycho-linguistic perspective to determine which grammatical relations
need to be ensured in what domains. Language phenomena which cannot be
captured locally, such as unbounded dependency constructions
(topicalization, wh-questions, ...) or middle distance dependencies
(raising, restructuring phenomena like clitic-climbing, ...) have thus
received much attention in the literature.
In this seminar, we investigate the nature of the domains that are
required to establish different kinds of grammatical relations. Some
investigators have 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 questions of how the locality of grammatical
relations is reflected in the architecture, and how the apparent
exceptions can be integrated into this picture, clearly involve
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.
The seminar is intended for graduate students from the department of
linguistics and the language departments. Prerequisite is an
introduction to syntax; some background in HPSG is useful.
Last modified: Tue Mar 25 18:51:56 EST 2003.
For questions or comments regarding this page, please
contact: Detmar Meurers.