Bjarne Ørsnes

Sameness, ellipsis and anaphora

We compare explicit assertions of sameness with analogous elliptical and anaphoric expressions, and find striking differences in their interpretation. We account for those differences with a two part proposal: first, we propose that same is additive, similar to too. Second, same must take scope over a containing event-denoting expression. We give evidence that the scope-taking of same is subject to standard island constraints, and we also show that same always compares two event-denoting clauses that differ in a relevant property.

Towards an HPSG Analysis of Object Shift in Danish

This paper develops an analysis of object shift in Danish. We suggest that object shift is best analyzed as an alternative mapping from the arg-st list to spr and comps.

Passives and evidentiality: Danish reportive passives and their equivalents in German

In Danish, passivized utterance and cognition verbs allow a particular construction where the subject of the passive verb is the semantic subject of the embedded predicate: præsidenten formodes at være flygtet (‘the president is assumed to have flown’). This use of utterance and cognition verbs with a “raised” subject can be seen as an evidentiality strategy since the embedded proposition is attributed to a source external to the speaker (hearsay), hence the term “reportive passive”. Reportive passives of this kind are completely absent in German. The article provides a discussion of the syntax and semantics of reportive passives in Danish arguing that it is a regular (compositional) passive formation and that no separate construction (with an idiosyncratic semantics) is needed to account for the observed properties. On the basis of the mulitilingual corpus Europarl, four different strategies to rendering reportive passives in German are identified. These strategies are discussed and illustrated with authentic examples, and their advantages and disadvantages in conveying the semantics and the information structure of the Danish reportive passives are pointed out.

An LFG account of the Danish verbal complex and its topicalization

Abstract In LFG auxiliaries are currently treated as junctional categories contributing tense and aspectual information, but no predicate. The benefits of this analysis are that the auxiliary complex is associated with a flat f-structure regardless of whether the tenses are realized morphologically or periphrastically. Under this analysis it is, however, difficult to account for the morphosyntactic dependencies holding between the auxiliaries and the dependent main verb. This check has been relegated to a separate morphological projection (Butt et al. 1996, Frank and Zaenen 2002). In a previous paper (Wedekind and ørsnes 2003) we developed an alternative approach that provides flat f-structures for auxiliary constructions without an additional morphological projection and the problems related to it. This new approach was illustrated by an account of the Danish verbal complex, including complex tenses, passives and modals. In the present paper we extend our account to VP-topicalization, which has not been addressed in the projection approaches.

Form und funktion bei der verwendung des ersatzinfinitivs im Deutschen zum gebrauch des ersatzinfinitivs bei fügungen mit modalverb und direktionalergänzung

Abstract Bei dem Ersatzinfinitiv (IPP) im Deutschen ersetzt ein Infinitiv ein Partizip Perfekt bei der Bildung eines Perfekttempus. Der IPP ist bei Modalverben mit einem reinen Infinitiv obligatorisch, aber darüber hinaus treten in vielen Fällen Schwankungen auf. Innerhalb der Klasse der Modalverben schwankt der Gebrauch bei Fügungen mit einer Direktionalergänzung (er hat ins Krankenhaus gemusst/müssen). Ziel dieses Aufsatzes ist es, diese Schwankung zu erklären. Auf dem Hintergrund einer Analyse der Syntax und Semantik der Fügung Modalverb + Direktionalergänzung wird die Schwankung als ein Wettbewerb zwischen kategorialen und funktionalen Eigenschaften erklärt. Bei der Kernkonstruktion des IPPs ist das Komplement des Modalverbs ein prädikatives Komplement (ein Komplement, dem das Letztargument fehlt) in der Form eines Infinitivs. Bei dem Modalverb mit Direktionalergänzung ist das Komplement ebenfalls ein prädikatives Komplement, jedoch in der Form einer PP, einer ADVP oder einer Partikel. Schwankungen bei der Perfektbildung treten deshalb auf, weil für einige Sprecher die kategorialen Merkmale (ein Infinitivkomplement), für andere die funktionalen Merkmale (ein Prädikativkomplement) für die Verwendung des IPPs ausschlaggebend sind. Die Analyse spricht mithin für ein syntaktisches Modell, das kategoriale und funktionale Information als zwei parallele Dimensionen der syntaktischen Beschreibung unterstützt.*

Complex event compounds in Danish : An HPSG approach

Abstract This paper presents an analysis of Complex Event Compounds (CECs) in Danish within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Complex Event Compounds are morphological objects with several syntactic properties and so they pose a challenge to any theory adhering to lexicalism, i.e. to the assumption that syntactic operations can not make reference to the internal structure of words. Furthermore, Danish synthetic compounds are interesting inasmuch as existing generative analyses of English compounding fail to account for the Danish data. The first part of the paper discusses the dominant syntactic properties of CECs and it is shown how lexicality can be defined relative to level of representation while exploiting the existing resources of hpsg. The second part explores the relation between a possible CEC and the syntactic subcategorization frame of the verbal head and it presents an analysis of the constraints governing the formation of CECs in Danish. Finally it is shown how com...