Peter Sells

A lexical account of inflectional suffixes in Korean

In this paper we give a reasonably comprehensive presentation of Korean inflectional suffixes, whose status has been somewhat controversial in the generative literature. We argue that nominal and verbal inflectional morphemes not only show phonological constituency with their hosts but also show evidence of lexical attachment, within the theory of Lexical Phonology and Morphology (Kiparsky (1982, 1985), Mohanan (1982, 1985), Inkelas (1989)). Consequently, the inflectional suffixes should combine with their hosts in a lexical formation component, separate from the syntax proper.In the second part of the paper we develop a lexical account in terms of the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (Bresnan (1982)), augmenting the principles in that theory governing formation of constituent structures. In particular, we introduce the notion ofType, which specifies relative to one element in the syntax what its sister element can be. In developing our analysis of the relevant Korean data, we show howType is a crucial aspect of the correct syntactic formations and further how this is the key explanatory concept for several complex interactions in the morphology.

Lectures on contemporary syntactic theories : an introduction to government-binding theory, generalized phrase structure grammar, and lexical-functional grammar

This books provides an introduction to three contemporary syntactic theories, Government-Binding Theory, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, and Lexical-Functional Grammar. In successive chapters, Sells lucidly presents and illustrates the fundamental apsects of each theory. In an introductory chapter he describes the basic syntactic concepts and assumptions shared by each theory; in the postscript, Thomas Wasow provides a more general overview of the different perspectives of these three approaches.

The Big Mess Construction: interactions between the lexicon and constructions

The so-called Big Mess Construction (BMC) (e.g. so prominent a punctuation ), introduced by a limited set of degree words, places an adjectival expression in the predeterminer position. In movement approaches, such idiosyncratic properties of the BMC have been attributed to the interaction of functional projections and movement operations, whereas in surface-oriented analyses focus has been placed on the supposition of special constructions and their constructional properties. In this article, we show that neither of these two previous perspectives captures the variations and flexibility of the construction in question satisfactorily. Our approach adopts the view that degree words are functors selecting their head, and attributes the peculiarities to the interactions between the lexical properties of the degree items and the constructional constraints in question.

Parsing korean honorification phenomena in a typed feature structure grammar

Honorific agreement is one of the main properties of languages like Korean or Japanese, playing an important role in appropriate communication. This makes the deep processing of honorific information crucial in various computational applications such as spoken language translation and generation. We argue that, contrary to the previous literature, an adequate analysis of Korean honorification involves a system that has access not only to morpho-syntax but to semantics and pragmatics as well. Along these lines, we have developed a typed feature structure grammar of Korean (based on the framework of HPSG), and implemented it in the Linguistic Knowledge Builder (LKB). The results of parsing our experimental test suites show that our grammar provides us with enriched grammatical information that can lead to the development of a robust dialogue system for the language.

English binominal NPs: A construction-based perspective

English binominal NPs (BNPs) (e.g., a giant of a man , a skullcracker of a headache ) are of empirical and theoretical interest due to their complex syntactic and semantic properties. In this paper, we review some basic properties of the BNP construction, focusing on its headedness, semantic relations, and the role of the preposition of . We argue that these properties suggest an account in the spirit of construction grammar. In particular, we argue that the English BNP is a nominal juxtaposition construction with particular special syntactic constraints, linked to a semantic interpretation reminiscent of the subject–predicate relation.

Noun-modifying constructions in Korean

We survey clausal noun-modification examples in Korean, initially setting out constructions into these types: argument and adjunct NMCCs, content noun NMCCs, and a group of other extended NMCCs. We show that the range of interpretations of NMCCs in Korean is not quite as broad as Japanese, but nevertheless we argue that the wide variety of interpretations in Korean motivates the claim that it has a GNMCC. We also argue, based on observed constraints on movement, that the Korean argument and adjunct NMCCs constitute an RC construction. We propose that there is no conflict in a language having both a syntactically identifiable RC construction as well as a GNMCC.

A computational implementation of internally headed relative clause constructions

The so-called Internally Headed Relative Clause (IHRC) construction found in the head-final languages Korean and Japanese has received little attention from computational perspectives even though it is frequently found in both text and speech. This is partly because there have been no grammars precise enough to allow deep processing of the construction’s syntactic and semantic properties. This paper shows that the typed feature structure grammar HPSG (together with the semantic representations of Minimal Recursion Semantics) offers a computationally feasible and useful way of deep-parsing the construction in question.