status of words; HPSG and CG

[Berthold Crysmann]

Stefan Müller wrote:

> 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).

Hi Stefan,

while I do share your view that they are translatable, the issue is whether
one really would want to do so, I mean from LR-based  to morpheme-based
....


>
> Having an (empty) affix is similar to having empty element in syntax.

Similar yes, but there are certain differences which I believe make the
option of (zero-)morphemes quite unattractive: Typically, in syntax, there
is only a single though largely underspecified empty element (e.g. trace)
the porperties of which are filled by syntactic context in a principled
way. In morpheme-based morphology, however, the purpose of introducing zero
element is quite a different one: here, properties are intrinsic to the
empty element (e.g. empty plural morphemes, empty agreement markers, empty
tense/aspect morphemes, empty category converters.... ), and what one will
end up with is a plethora of homophonous (all zero) , yet
categorically/featurally  distinct morphemes. (Add to this the necessity of
adding black hole morphemes, for subtractive morphology and the like).  It
is probably quite telling that noone, as far as I'm aware, has introduced
empty heads into HPSG. But this is exactly what people in morpheme-based
morphology are doing. Worse, while in syntax empty elements are always
filled by the context, this is not necessarily true of morphology. I feel
that the equivalence is  only of a very  technical nature, then....

Berthold


>
> 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/

--
Berthold Crysmann
Deutsches Forschungszentrum Kuenstliche Intelligenz (DFKI) GmbH
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
D-66123 Saarbrücken