A Frame-Based Semantics of the Dative Alternation in Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars

It is well known that the meaning of a verb-based construction depends not only on the lexical meaning of the verb but also on its specific syntagmatic environment. Lexical meaning interacts with constructional meaning in intricate ways and this interaction is crucial for theories of argument linking and the syntax-semantics interface. These insights have led proponents of Construction Grammar to treating every linguistic expression as a construction (Goldberg 1995). But the influence of the syntagmatic context on the constitution of verb meaning has also been taken into account by lexicalist approaches to argument realization (e.g., Van Valin and LaPolla 1997). The crucial question for any theory of the syntax-semantic interface is how the meaning components are distributed over the lexical and morphosyntactic units of a linguistic expression and how these components combine. A grammar model that is able to capture phenomena of this type should be sufficiently flexible with respect to the factorization and combination of lexical and constructional units both on the syntactic and the semantic level. We propose a novel framework for modelling such phenomena in a formally precise way which is suitable for computational processing. To this end, we integrate Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars (LTAG, Joshi and Schabes 1997) with Frame Semantics and employ the technique of metagrammatical specification as introduced by Candito (1999) and Crabbé and Duchier (2005). The basic idea of the latter is to specify elementary syntactic trees as minimal models of sets of tree constraints. We extend this idea of constraint-based specification to the level of frame-semantic descriptions. That is, both, the elementary syntactic trees and their associated semantic frames are specified by constraints. This approach allows a strong factorization of the syntactic and semantic information. The so-called elementary trees defined by the constraints in the metagrammar constitute a finite set of trees. These trees can then be used to derive larger trees by substitution and adjunction. We illustrate our metagrammatical decomposition of syntactic trees and semantic frames by a case study on various aspects of the dative alternation in English, which is is well-known to be sensitive to lexical and constructional meaning components. A specific charasteristics of LTAG is its extended domain of locality: In LTAG, the (nonrecursive) elementary trees defined by the constraints in the metagrammar represent entire subcategorization frames and can therefore be locally linked to a semantic frame that encodes the