Summary: Definiteness effect in HPSG

[Raúl Aranovich]

This is a summary of the answers I received regarding my question on
definiteness and the S-level/I-level predicate distinction in HPSG. Thanks
to all that replied: Line Hove Mikkelsen, Anna Feldman, Judith Tonhauser,
Shalom Lappin, Louise McNally, Colin Matheson. I apologize for the fact
that some of the references are incomplete. I would appreciate any further
information.

As I feared, references to work that directly addresses the relationship
between definiteness, word order, and the Stage/Individual level predicate
distinction in HPSG are scant or altogether non-existent. This may be a
hint that fruitful work can be developed in this area. A general reference
on the DE/BPs and HPSG is the work by Sheila Glasbey in the CSLI Tbilisi
volume edited by J. Ginsburg and perhaps also her SALT VII(?) paper.

There is some work in HPSG on the definite/indefinite contrast as it
pertains to the internal structure of the NP. It is not clear to me whether
these works address the distribution and interpretation of
definites/indefinites. Dimitra Kolliakou has some work on multiple definite
markers, polydefinites etc. She is working on Greek, and her work can be
found at <http://www.ncl.ac.uk/english/staff/kolliakou.htm>. Another
reference is work by Shuly Wintner. He has a paper on definiteness in
Hebrew which appeared recently in the Journal of Linguistics (see also
<http://www.cs.haifa.ac.il/~shuly/>). Colin Matheson has a chapter on
definiteness in his PhD thesis which dealt with English partitives. It's in
GPSG, available at <http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~colin/Thesis>. He revises
Selkirk and Jackendoff's approach to the question of bare nouns Vs full NPs
in English partitives.

There is also a lot of work on the English existential construction,
Starting With Pollard and Sag 1994, but research on the status of expletive
'there' and its relationship to the associate NP seems to displace concerns
about the definiteness restriction on the associate NP to the background.
Shalom Lappin and David Johnson discuss definiteness and existential
'there' constructions in their book 'Local Constraints vs Economy', CSLI,
1999. The relevan sections are pp. 26-30 and pp. 34-77. Louise McNally gave
a paper at the LSA not long ago using HPSG to deal with the contrast
between "There are flies in my soup" vs. ??"Flies are in my soup"

The literature on Bare Nouns in HPSG extend to other phenomena, and perhaps
some leads can be found there. Line Mikkelsen and Ash Asudeh propose an
HPSG analysis of incorporated bare nouns in Danish in a paper in Cann,
Grover & Miller (2001) "Grammatical Interfaces in HPSG" published by CSLI.

There are some analyses of the definiteness effect in existential
constructions that could be of interest to HPSGers, eve though these papers
do not use the HPSG formalism. Line Mikkelsen proposes an OT analysis of
definiteness effects in Danish expletive constructions ("Reanalyzing the
definiteness effect: evidence from Danish", available on Rutgers Optimality
Archive). Judith Tonhauser's Master's Thesis (`Dynamic Semantics and the
Temporal Interpretation of Noun Phrases) (University of Stuttgart, 2000)
touches upon the interpretation of Existential Sentences, Bare Plurals, the
individual/stage-level distinction with respect to the temporal
interpretation of NPs in these contexts. The formalization is presented in
DRT. <www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/~tonhaujh/thesis.ps>. Louise McNally
addresses the incompatibility of some indefinites with i-level predicates
in her paper "Stativity and Theticity", available on her web page
<www.upf.es/dtf/personal/louisemcnally>.

For the distribution of bare plurals in Spanish, Josep Fontana and Louise
McNally have another LSA paper on the distribution of bare plurals in
Spanish from 1995, where they criticize the alleged 'unaccusativity'
constraint on the construction. There are also some papers by Manuel
Leonetti, and a whole book edited by Igancio Bosque on the "state of the
art" of generics in Spanish. Louise McNally argues that the existential
interpretation of bare plurals in Spanish follows from the fact that they
denote properties. She has a paper on this that is available from her web page.


                 |-------------------------------------|
                 |           Raul Aranovich            |
                 |      Department of linguistics      |
                 |    Univesity of California Davis    |
                 |         One Shields Avenue          |
                 |        Davis, CA 95616, USA         |
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                 |           (530) 752-9933            |
                 |      <raranovich at ucdavis.edu>       |
                 |-------------------------------------|