Local Semantics in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Semantic research is generally divided into lexical semantics (LS) and compositional semantics (CS). LS concentrates on the relation between a semantic functor and its arguments, be it in terms of semantic selectional restrictions or in terms of linking, i.e., in terms of the relation between syntactic complements and semantic argument slots. CS is concerned with the way the semantic contributions of constituents in a sentence are combined to arrive at the interpretation of the sentence. Here, the scope of quantifiers and other operators is the central notion. This devision of labor in semantics has its parallel in syntax, as evidenced by the Avs. A-bar syntax of Government and Binding Theory for example. In the case of syntax, the modularization and the interaction of the two “kinds” of syntax is relatively well studied. At the semantic side, however, the relation between the two kinds of semantics has hardly been addressed. In this paper we will contribute to the study of the LS-CS interface by concentrating on one empirical phenomenon, namely selection, and by making a concrete proposal for a particular linguistic theory, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG, Pollard and Sag (1994)). HPSG is a rigidly formalized linguistic framework (Richter, 2000), and for both, LS and CS there are a number of substantial proposals to build on.