Towards an Account of Extraposition in HPSG

Local Ambiguity Packing and Discontinuity in German

We report on recent advances in HPSG parsing of German with local ambiguity packing (Oepen and Carroll, 2000), achieving a speed-up factor of 2 on a balanced test-suite. In contrast to earlier studies carried out for English using the same packing algorithm, we show that restricting semantic features only is insufficient for achieving acceptable runtime performance with a German HPSG grammar. I...

A Monostratal Treatment of It Extraposition without Lexical Rules

This paper deals with alternations of the type (1) That Sandy snores bothers Kim. (2) It bothers Kim that Sandy snores. In the monostratal framework of HPSG this alternation is described in terms of a lexical rule. The starting point is the lexical entry for the use of bothers in

The Morphosyntax of Polish Verbal Negation: Towards an HPSG Account

Result clauses and the structure of degree phrases

I am concerned here with the structure of Degree Phrases which introduce Result clauses. After demonstrating that degree words select these clauses, I look at some previous proposals regarding this structure. I consider Abney's (1987) account, an extraposition-based version using Jackendoff's (1977) work, and finally Baltin (1987), which involves both selection and extraposition. Next, I introd...

A polynomial parser for the topological model

This paper describes a parser for German, which treats major phenomena of word order including scrambling, (partial) VP fronting and extraposition. The outputs of the parser are dependency trees and topological phrase structures. We use the CKY parsing algorithm, which is polynomial with some bounds on the number of emancipations (that is, constituents that are positioned outside of the domain ...