Syntactic Analysis An HPSG-based Approach

The auxiliary dependency analyzed in the preceding chapter takes the form of a complex network of distributional facts emerging as the consequence of a simple set of purely lexical properties. Both (i) the relative order of auxiliaries and so-called ‘main verbs’ (a notable misnomer, in our terms, since ‘main verbs’ in sentences with auxiliaries are actually deeply buried), and (ii) the morphology of clauses containing auxiliaries are due to the selectional properties of individual words, and the characteristic existence of gaps in the lexicon, along with a requirement that the top hierarchical level of English sentences be finite. Given these properties of individual words, the independently motivated featurematching requirements of the grammar, as laid out in the preceding chapters, automatically yield the correct morphosyntactic dependencies with no more effort than is required to specify that talk requires a PP complement and discuss an NP. This demonstration offers strong support for the general approach taken so far, but it would be reassuring to find that there are other, unrelated phenomena which can be satisfactorily described using the same machinery. In this chapter, we briefly survey several grammatical patterns in English and a range of other languages which can be captured rather simply using the same technology already implemented in the auxiliary analysis presented in the preceding chapter.

Case and Agreement

Case

The first of these patterns, referred to as case, identifies a generally systematic marking of the dependents of a head which often correlates with what would be called grammatical relations (subject/object/indirect object/adjunct), but which typically have additional semantic content; thus we talk about ‘dative’ case, associated with a beneficiary role, corresponding to Robin in I gave Robin a book (although this case is not realized in the form of English words) in which the transfer of some benefit to the individual marked with dative morphology is conveyed (though dative case may show up in nonbenefactive contexts as well, as we'll see below), or the possessive, as in Where is my book?, where possession is conveyed by my. In some languages, such as English, case is vestigial; although its distant ancestor Anglo-Saxon had a rich case system, reflecting the grammar of its own pan-Germanic ancestor and, ultimately, the ancestral Indo-European proto-language, English has lost almost all vestiges of this system.