1. Background and goals Focus particles (FP) as well as discourse particles (DiP) are kinds of operators and therefore take propositional scope. For FPs, there is an ongoing debate about apparent exceptions that emerge from examples like John eats only vegetables where only vegetables is by all syntactic criteria a constituent while the FP does not prima facie have propositional scope. Something must happen for the FP to attain scope. LF-movement was a popular rescuing device. For DiPs, a similar problem can be noticed. In German, DiPs are known to appear in clause medial position, and according to the most plausible analysis they take at least scope over the minimal proposition (‘complete functional complex’) VP/vP. Unlike adverbs, they cannot appear in the left or in the right clausal periphery, s. Thurmair (1989). A challenging exception is that there are wh-questions in which the DiP forms a constituent with the wh-phrase and moves along with it to SpecCP. Thus, the DiP participates in exceptional constituency and appears ex-situ. The first goal of this talk is to give a reason for the exceptional word order and to explain how the DiP obtains propositional scope nevertheless. The second goal is of a more general nature. We develop a theory by which there is parametric variation for particle constructions. Closer inspection reveals that this variation is already established in the grammar of more familiar operator-related areas such as wh and negation.

This work investigates the role of semantic clause types and modality in argumentative texts. We annotate argumentative microtexts with Situation Entity (SE) classes and additionately label the segments that contain modal verbs with their modal senses. We analyse both the correlation of SE classes and of modal verbs and senses with components of argument structures (such as premises and conclusions) and their functions (such as support and rebuttal). We find interesting tendencies in the correlations between both argument components and argumentative functions with SE types. We also see interesting distribution di↵erences of modal verbs and senses within argumentative components and functions, as well as evidence that modal senses can be helpful to distinguish conclusions and premises. We conclude that both semantic clause types as well as modal senses can be deployed for automatic recognition and fine-grained classification of argumentative text passages. NOTE: some of the material presented in this paper overlaps with [1].

The aim of this paper is to provide a preliminary characterisation of locality constraints on distance distributivity in Polish. The generalisations are encoded using the propositional variant of glue and demonstrate its usefulness. An extension to distribution over events is sketched.

English benefactive NPs pattern with arguments in some ways and with adjuncts in others. This paper proposes an analysis of benefactive NPs that accounts for this dual behavior. In particular, I argue that benefactive NPs are generally not included in the basic argument structure of verbs. Instead, they are added by an argument structure rule. In other words, English benefactive NPs are derived arguments, in the sense of Needham and Toivonen (2011).

This paper revisits the question of whether optional, non-core participant PPs are to be treated as arguments or as adjuncts in linguistic theory in general and in LFG grammars in particular. I argue that a number of considerations converge on pointing towards the latter option.

We present an analysis of sentence initial object es ‘it’ in German. The weak pronoun es may only realize such an object under specific information structural conditions. We follow recent work suggesting these conditions are exactly those that licence the use of the presentational construction, marked by a sentence initial dummy es. We propose that the initial objects are an example of function amalgamation, show that only objects that may also appear in the clause-internal postverbal domain can participate in this fusion and make this precise in LFG. We end the paper with a contrastive discussion.

This paper describes INESS-Search, a new search tool for con stituency, dependency and LFG treebanks. The tool is derived from TIGER Search and has been extended to encompass full first-order predicate lo gic over node variables. In addition, several operators have been implem ented that are specific for querying cand f-structures. The original TIGERSe arch syntax has been extended and considerably simplified, thus making a gra phic l query input device less necessary. The search index is dynamicall y updated when the treebank is modified. The INESS-Search tool is usable via a Web interface as an integrated part of INESS, the Norwegian Infrastru ctu e for the Exploration of Syntax and Semantics.

I present data from Tolaki, an Austronesian language of Central Indonesia, which challenges the notion that grammatical functions form discrete categories. I argue that current models of grammatical functions within Lexical Functional Grammar cannot account for the data we find. If we were to posit discrete categories for grammatical functions on the basis of different behaviour under different morpho-syntactic tests, we would be forced to posit a minimum of nine categories in order to account for the results; nearly double the number of categories currently provided for by LFG. A better way of analysing the data we find in Tolaki is to posit a continuum of grammatical functions between the most and least privileged grammatical functions, subject and adjunct. Participants are located along this continuum and are either more subject-like or more adjunct-like.

This paper investigates the syntax of clefts in Wolof and proposes an analysis based on the Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) formalism. Wolof clefts illustrate an interaction between morphology, syntax and information structure. In particular, they vary morphosyntactically depending on what item is clefted. Structurally, the clefts lack the cleft pronoun, are mono-clausal at the phrasal level, however, bi-clausal at the functional level. Furthermore, they relate to copular constructions in that both instantiate the same form. Thus, an understanding of these constructions is a prerequisite for understanding how clefting works. In this paper, I review different approaches towards copula predication within LFG and present my analysis of Wolof data. I propose a parallel syntactic approach that assumes a close-complement (PREDLINK) for copular and cleft clauses. In addition, I posit an i(nformation)-structure projection to allow for extra-syntactic analysis.

In this paper, we present an investigation of the argument/a djunct distinction in the context of LFG. We focus on those cases where certain gr mmatical functions that qualify as arguments according to all standa rd tests (Needham and Toivonen, 2011) are only optionally realized. We argue f or an analysis first proposed by Blom et al. (2012), and we show how we can m ke it work within the machinery of LFG. Our second contribution re gards how we propose to interpret a specific case of optional arguments, o p ional objects. In this case we propose to generalize the distinction betwee n transitive and intransitive verbs to a continuum. Purely transitive and in tra sitive verbs represent the extremes of the continuum. Other verbs, while lea ning towards one or the other end of this spectrum, show an alternating behavi or between the two extremes. We show how our first contribution is capable of accounting for these cases in terms of exceptional behavior. The key ins ight we present is that the verbs that exhibit the alternating behavior can b est e understood as being capable of dealing with an exceptional context. In o ther words they display some sort of control on the way they compose with thei r context. This will prompt us also to rethink the place of the notion of subca tegorization in the LFG architecture

In this paper I develop an LFG account of second position clit ic placement in R . gvedic Sanskrit. Clitic phenomena in this language are both more complicated and more ambiguous than (supposedly) in Serbia n/Croatian/ Bosnian, whose second position clitic data were recently tr eated by Bögel et al. (2010). I develop a formal treatment of clitic ‘moveme nt’ which partly builds on Bögel et al.’s approach but which differs in certai n fundamentals of formalism, maintaining a strict division between the synta ctic and prosodic components of the grammar.

This paper investigates the grammar of two types of spatial particles in Hungarian. We provide an analysis in the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), which has been successfully implemented on the Xerox Linguistic Environment (XLE) platform of the Parallel Grammar international project. We propose that, in the productive cases, syntactic predicate composition of a special sort takes place via XLE’s restriction operator. We treat the non-productive cases by dint of appropriate specifications in the (distinct) lexical entries of verbs and particles in combination with XLE’s concatenation template.

Polysynthetic languages pose special challenges for the morphologysyntax interface because information otherwise associated with words, phrases and clauses is encoded in a single morphological word. In this paper, I am concerned with the implementation of the verbal structure of the polysynthetic language Murrinh-Patha and the questions this raises for the morphology-syntax interface.

In this paper, we explore the phenomenon of Similar Place Avoidance (SPA), according to which successive consonants within stems sharing the same place of articulation are avoided. This principle has recently been hypothesized as a universal tendency although evidence from only a few languages scattered across the world has been considered. Using methods taken from the field of Visual Analytics, which have demonstrably been shown to help with understanding complex interactions across large data sets, we investigated a large crosslinguistic lexical database (comprising data on more than 4,500 languages) and found that a universal tendency can indeed be maintained.

It is a well-known typological universal that long distance reflexives are generally monomorphemic and complex reflexives tend to be licensed only locally. I argue in this paper that the Hungarian body part reflexive maga ‘himself’ and its more complex counterpart önmaga ‘himself, his own self’ represent a non-isolated pattern that adds a new dimension to this typology. Nominal modification of a highly grammaticalized body part reflexive may reactivate the dormant underlying possessive structure, thereby granting the more complex reflexive variant an increased level of referentiality and syntactic freedom. In particular, the reactivation of the possessive structure in önmaga is shown to be concomitant with the possibility of referring to representations of the self, as well as a preference for what appears to be coreferential readings and the loss or dispreference of bound-variable readings.

This paper presents a novel architecture for specifying rich morphosyntactic representations and learning the associated grammars from annotated data. The key idea underlying the architecture is the application of the traditional notion of a “paradigm” to the syntactic domain. N-place predicates associated with paradigm cells are viewed as relational networks that are realized recursively by combining and ordering cells from other paradigms. The complete morphosyntactic representation of a sentence is then viewed as a nested integrated structure interleaving function and form by means of realization rules. This architecture, called Relational-Realizational, has a simple instantiation as a generative probabilistic model of which parameters can be statistically learned from treebank data. An application of this model to Hebrew allows for accurate description of word-order and argument marking patterns familiar from Semitic traditional grammars. The associated treebank grammar can be used for statistical parsing and is shown to improve state-of-the-art parsing results for Hebrew. The availability of a simple, formal, robust, implementable and statistically interpretable working model opens new horizons in computational linguistics — at least in principle, we should now be able to quantify typological trends which have so far been stated informally or only tacitly reflected in corpus statistics.