Subject Areas: Nontransformational syntax of German, HPSG Implementation
Title: Yet Another Paper about Partial Verb Phrase Fronting in German
I describe a very simple HPSG analysis for fronting of non-maximal projections (VPs and Aps)
(1) Ein Märchen erzählen wird er seiner Tochter müssen.
a fairy tale tell will he his daughter must
`He will have to tell his daughter a fairy tale.'
(2) Treu will Karl seiner Frau sein.
faithful wants Karl his wife be
`Karl wants to be faithful to his wife.'
Just a minor change in the feature geometry of signs
is sufficient to cope with spurious ambiguity problems previous
accounts had.
A problem with ill-formed signs that are admitted by all HPSG accounts for partial verb phrase fronting known so far will be explained and a solution will be suggested that uses the difference between combinatoric relations of signs and their representation in word order domains.
The paper is published in Proceedings of COLING 96, p. 800-805.
DFKI-Report 97-07 (28 pages)
Coling version (6 pages):