This paper describes a method of semi-automatically acquiring an English HPSG grammar from the Penn Treebank. First, heuristic rules are employed to annotate the treebank with partially-specified derivation trees. Lexical entries are automatically extracted from the annotated corpus by inversely applying schemata to partially-specified derivation trees.

In this paper I examine what have often been considered the syntactic properties of Gapping constructions (Ross, 1970) and show that they are in fact discourse-pragmatic in nature. I offer a novel analysis of Gapping constructions by extending recent Question Under Discussion (QUD)-based accounts in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Ginzburg and Sag, 2000; Ginzburg, 2012).

During the last years, several different analyses for partial verb phrase fronting have been proposed (Pollard, 1996; Nerbonne, 1994; Baker, 1994; Hinrichs and Nakazawa, 1994). The most promising account so far has been the one of Hinrichs and Nakazawa. This account, however, suffers from some drawbacks that will be discussed in section 4. I will present a rather simple account that uses the st...

In this paper we propose a method to compositionally interpret tenses of Japanese complex sentences on the basis of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Discourse Representation Theory. In this approach, each of the tense-bearing forms such as main verbs and the past auxiliary is given a single temporal meaning independent of its position in the syntactic structure. The `relative tense theo...

We describe our SemEval2012 shared Task 5 system in this paper. The system includes three cascaded components: the tagging semantic role phrase, the identification of semantic role phrase, phrase and frame semantic dependency parsing. In this paper, semantic role phrase is tagged automatically based on rules, and takes Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) as the statistical identification model of ...

This paper shows that Right-Node Raising and its mirror image, Argument Cluster Coordination, are fundamentally different phenomena, and provides evidence that the range of constructions in which Right-Node Raising may occur is much wider than usually assumed in the literature. We argue that this phenomenon is best captured as ellipsis of prosodic units under semantic and phonological identity....

This paper addresses the issue of Split Intransitivity (si) and Unaccusative Mismatches (uMs), proposing a constraint-based approach to si and ums within a recent framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. I argue against the widely accepted dichotomous distinction of intransitive verbs, which has been advanced by the Unaccusative Hypothesis [Perlmutter (1978)]. I then propose a quadrip...

The so-called multiple nominative constructions (MNC) have been one of the puzzling phenomena in topic-prominent languages like Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. This paper first investigates the basic syntactic properties of three MNCs and then provides a constraint-based analysis within the theory of HPSG (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar). The analysis presented here is lead-driven' and 'co...

The grammar of a language is a device that describes the structure of that language. The grammar is comprised of a set of rules whose goal is twofold: first these rules can be used to create sentences of the associated language and only these, and second they can be used to classify whether a given sentence is an element of the language or not. The goal of a linguist is to discover grammars tha...