Argument Realization in Dutch

The treatment of argument realization is rather straightforward for a language like English, but for a language with relatively free word order, such as Dutch, it is a complex matter. It is not surprising then that the devices which are commonly used to deal with it show a high degree of computational complexity. They typically include movement, as in transformational grammar, or the dissociation of order-in-the-representation from the surface order, as in certain types of monostratal grammar. For the purpose of natural language description these devices are certainly convenient, but for the purpose of natural language processing they are less attractive. For this reason, I propose an alternative treatment of argument realization, which is consistently monostratal and surface-oriented. Its cornerstone is the GENERALIZED ARGUMENT REALIZATION PRINCIPLE. It is a generalization of the Argument Realization Principle which is proposed in (Ginzburg and Sag 2000) to deal with English. 1 The argument realization principle The lexical entries of argument taking words commonly include information about the number and the kinds of arguments which they select. Intransitive verbs, for instance, select one NP and transitive verbs two. This information is useful for syntactic and semantic processing, on condition that it is complemented with information on how the arguments are realized in sentences. For a language with a relatively rigid word order, such as English, the constraints on argument realization are relatively straightforward. In an active English clause, for instance, the first NP argument is realized as the subject and precedes the verb, whereas the other arguments follow the verb in a fixed order. (1) a. They gave her a bike. b. * Gave they her a bike. c. * They her a bike gave. d. * They gave a bike her. To spell this out in formal terms HEAD-DRIVEN PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR employs two kinds of features. There is the ARG(UMENT)-ST(RUCTURE) feature, which specifies the syntactic and semantic properties of the arguments which a word selects, and there are the valence features SUBJ(ECT), SP(ECIFIE)R and COMP(LEMENT)S, which spell out how these arguments are realized. The link between them is defined by the ARGUMENT REALIZATION PRINCIPLE (Ginzburg and Sag 2000, 23).1 1Throughout the text, the boxed alphabetic characters stand for lists of objects, whereas the boxed integers stand for individual objects, usually of type synsem. is a concatenation operation on lists.