This issue was first published on the no longer existing Gazette webpage of the Freie Universität Berlin.

HPSG Gazette – Issue #8 (October 2015) –

Outline

Editorial
Conference
New project
Publications
Strip of the issue

Editorial

Dear All,

the October issue of the Gazette is now online.

You can find here information on conferences, publications and new projects in the last quartal.

Please, do not forget to submit any HPSG-related information (reports on HPSG-related talks, work in progress, theses, new HPSG projects and software, moves within the HPSG community, etc.) for the next issue of the gazette (to appear in the middle of January) to:

gazette@hpsg.fu-berlin.de

Urgent information should be posted on the the HPSG mailing list rather than sent to the Gazette.

Best regards,
Elodie Winckel & Antonio Machicao y Priemer

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Conferences

The 3rd European HPSG Workshop in Frankfurt (Updated!)

The 3rd European HPSG Workshop will take place on Monday and Tuesday 16–17 November 2015 at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Campus Westend.
There will be a warming up social meeting on the Sunday evening.
To help our planning, if you intend to come along, please let Philippa Cook know by e-mail. Please state if you will just attend or if you will also join us for the warming up and/or for dinner.

For the workshop programme and further information please check the website of the workshop.

HPSG-LFG 2016

The joint HPSG-LFG 2016 conference will be held in Warsaw, most probably during or around the week 25–29 July 2016.
(There is no web page yet, I am afraid.)
All best,
Adam Przepiórkowski

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New Project

Long-distance dependencies in French: comparative analysis (HPSG and Minimalist Program)

Fund­ing Pe­ri­od: 1st October 2015 to 30th September 2018
Prin­ci­pal In­ves­ti­ga­tor: Ste­fan Müller

Website: http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/Projects/French-NLD/index.html.en

The pro­ject ex­plores long-dis­tance de­pen­den­cies, es­pe­cial­ly in in­ter­rog­a­tive and rel­a­tive con­struc­tions, using two gram­mat­i­cal frame­works (HPSG and the Min­i­mal­ist Pro­gram). In a first step, the data sit­u­a­tion will be im­proved through cor­pus anal­y­ses and in­quiries with na­tive speak­ers. This will yield, for the first time, a broad em­pir­i­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal cov­er­age and a max­i­mal­ly com­plete de­scrip­tion of long-dis­tance de­pen­den­cies in French, an area that has been only frag­men­tar­i­ly de­scribed up to now. The over­reach­ing ob­jec­tive of the pro­ject is to an­swer the ques­tion of how com­plex, nu­mer­ous and con­struc­tion-spe­cif­ic the el­e­ments of syn­tac­tic de­scrip­tion must be in order to ex­plain the phe­nom­e­na con­tained in a broad sam­ple of data that show long-dis­tance-de­pen­den­cies in French. The se­lect­ed frame­works pre­sent two ex­treme poles of pos­si­ble in­ter­pre­ta­tions. The Min­i­mal­ist Pro­gram re­quires mod­el­ing by means of atom­ic units (lex­i­cal en­tries with head sta­tus), which in­ter­act with very gen­er­al syn­tac­tic prin­ci­ples of a very local range. Sim­i­lar­ly to what is claimed by con­struc­tion gram­mar, HPSG has ex­pand­ed the term "lex­i­con" and can for­mu­late, if nec­es­sary, com­plex de­scrip­tion units in which larg­er con­stel­la­tions and the range of con­straints are al­ready de­fined. In an in­ter­pre­ta­tion with­in Con­struc­tion Gram­mar, this can lead to the for­mu­la­tion of a con­struc­tion fam­i­ly, as re­quired in Sag (2010).
At the end of the pro­ject fund­ing pe­ri­od, a de­tailed com­par­i­son of the two anal­y­ses is planned to be avail­able.

Publications

Predicative Constructions: From the Fregean to a Montagovian Treatment

Frank Van Eynde
Series: Studies in Constraint-based Lexicalism
CSLI Publications: Stanford University, 2015
xiv + 283 pages
ISBN: 9781575868370
Price: $30.00

Predicative constructions are ubiquitous. A recent count in a Dutch corpus revealed that one in four sentences contains at least one predicative construction. It is no surprise then that they have drawn a lot of attention, both in linguistics and in logic. Most of the existing treatments in generative grammar –transformational as well as monostratal– stress the differences between predicative and transitive constructions, and assume that the former show a discrepancy between syntactic and semantic structure. This is in line with the Frege-Russell treatment of predicative constructions in logic, but it leads to a number of problems, especially for the analysis of nominal, infinitival, gerundial and clausal predicative complements.
As an alternative, Frank Van Eynde develops a treatment in line with the Quine-Montague analysis of the English copula. It is based on the assumption that the syntactic and semantic structure of predicative constructions are homomorphous and it is cast in the Typed Feature Structure notation of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Since this approach is new, it is motivated extensively, not only with the classical qualitative weighing of pros and cons but also with detailed quantitative investigations of treebanks.

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Strip of the issue

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