Using Lexical Principles in Hpsg to Generalize over Valence Properties

One of the key aspects of HPSG theories on Germanic and Romance languages is the lexical speciication of verbs selecting a verbal complement. Hinrichs and Nakazawa (1989) showed how the idea of functional composition from categorial grammar can be expressed as part of the speciication of a lexical entry, and versions of this argument raising speciication have since been used in most work on Germanic or Romance languages. In these proposals , the discussion has focussed on the speciication of exemplary lexical entries of verbs which are intended to be representative for certain lexical classes. These classes are not formally represented, but each verb in such an intuitively understood class is intended to bear the illustrated speciications. A number of questions arise from this situation: How can the implicit notion of a lexical class actually be represented in the theory? How can generalizations (such as the argument raising distribution of valence) over all words in one lexical class be expressed? Finally, in many current HPSG theories building on Pollard and Sag (1994, ch. 9), the argument structure is represented in every word in addition to the valence speciication. Apart from serving as data structure for the binding theory, the precise role of the argument structure representation has yet to be The research presented here was carried out in the projects B4 and B8 of the Son-derforschungsbereich 340, nanced by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. I would like to thank Paola Monachesi, Kordula De Kuthy, Thilo GG otz, Tilman HH ohle, and Frank Richter for discussions on the topic presented here, and the three anonymous reviewers for interesting comments.