Incorporating Selectional Restrictions into HPSG

This article is concerned with integrating the phenomenon of selectional restrictions in a formal grammar theory. Firstly, the question of treating selectional restrictions purely in the semantic module is discussed, as there are some contextual (or pragmatic) influences, which can repair the ill-formedness of violated selectional restrictions. Secondly, we shed light on the stucture of pragmatics in general and then see how pragmatics is dealt with in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, a formal framework we take as a concrete example for implementation. Then we present existing approaches to selectional restrictions within this framework and, lastly, make our own proposal which describes the subject as part of the semantics-pragmatics interface. In particular, we show how a semantic ontology can be integrated.