Valerio Allegranza general and computational linguistics article

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Valerio Allegranza

Determiners as Functors:

NP Structure in Italian

published in:: Sergio Balari and Luca Dini, eds., Romance in HPSG. Vol. 75 of CSLI Lecture Notes, CSLI Publications, Stanford, 1998. (pp. 55-108)
Copyright © CSLI Publications, Stanford University. [ http://cslipublications.stanford.edu ]

Abstract:

This article offers a comprehensive Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) treatment of determiners within the Noun Phrase (NP), accounting for their rich variety as regards distributional behaviour, category features, dependency relations and semantic contribution. To introduce the reader to the empirical problems at issue, a contrastive examination of English vs. Italian data is carried out at various points in the work, but the latter language in particular is focussed on; especially the study of co-occurrence restrictions on Italian determiners is detailed and systematic. On the other hand, the suggested solutions go beyond language-specific considerations and provide evidence for a revision of HPSG that gives due prominence to the notion of 'functor', resulting in a formally simpler approach to head-specifier dependencies and an improved version of the Semantics Principle.

Among other things, this study enhances the lexicalist, non-configurational version of X-bar Theory due to Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag. According to the revision of HPSG proposed in the article, the bar level of a nominal construction with some determiner as nonhead daughter and, concomitantly, the specifier or adjunct role of that daughter, instead of being stated by the Immediate Dominance (ID) schema the construction instantiates, follow from lexically based determination values transmitted between the determiner and the nominal mother node. It is thus shown how an HPSG system of the kind reduces the repertory of ID schemata and ancillary syntactic constraints and, moreover, allows the treatment of specifiers to avoid cyclic feature structures and disjunctive subcategorization frames, without abandoning a traditional assumption of nominal headedness of the NP. Semantically, the quantificational import of determiners but also of other relevant constituents of nominal constructions is investigated, extending and revising the 'quantifier storage' technique of HPSG consistently with a treatment of bare plurals that does not resort to empty determiners, nor requires the introduction of additional lexical readings.

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