status of words; HPSG and CG

[Stefan Müller]

Dear Dean,

Andreas Kathol wrote:
> You may want to look at Krieger and Nerbonne's (1993?) treatment of
> _-bar_ affixation in terms of a morphological combinatorial system
> that parallels that of syntax. The disadvantages of such an approach
> have been discussed extensively by Susanne Riehemann. More recently,
> Stefan Mueller (talk at Trondheim HPSG conference) has proposed a
> treatment of German separable prefixes in which valence information is
> either "cashed out" syntactically (prefix as a separate syntactic
> unit) or morphologically (prefix as part of a lexical word). His work
> may come closer to what you're interested in because is looks like it
> could provide a model of how to deal with the Cree cases.

The details of the proposals can be found in a book that is downloadable
at:

http://www.dfki.de/~stefan/Pub/e_complex.html

As far as the affix based analyses and the lexical rule-based analyses
of morphology are concerned, I think these are translatable into each
other (under certain assumptions about the nature of lexical rules).
Having an (empty) affix is similar to having empty element in syntax.
Empty elements in syntax can be avoided if the work they do is done by a
lexical rule or a unary projection. In the same vein lexical rules can
be used for morphology: The effect one would get combining an affix with
a stem and projecting certain features is incorporated into the lexical
rule directly.

The way in which the two approaches are related is discussed in detail
in the book (Chapter 7.2.5).

The book also contains a very brief comparison between Goldberg's
Construction Grammar approach to resultatives and a lexical rule-based
account for resultative constructions.

Maybe the discussion is of interest for those who want to compare
(certain kinds of / certain analyses in) Construction Grammar with HPSG.

Greetings from Berlin

        Stefan


--
PD Dr. Stefan Müller
Institut für Germanistische Sprachwissenschaft
Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena
Fürstengraben 30
D-07743 Jena

Tel: (+49) (+3641) 9 44 320     http://www.dfki.de/~stefan/
Fax: (+49) (+3641) 9 44 322
http://www.dfki.de/~stefan/Babel/Interaktiv/Babajava/