An alternative to the HPSG Raising Principle on the description-level

Authors

  • David Lahm Universität Tübingen

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21248/hpsg.2009.10

Abstract

I reconsider the HPSG Raising Principle which is introduced in Pollard & Sag (1994) to constrain the way in which lexical entries describe the SUBCAT lists of the words they license. On the basis of whether a complement is assigned a semantic role in a lexical entry or not, this entry may not or must describe this complement as structure-shared with the unrealised subject of some other (non-subject) complement. The formal status of this principle is still unclear, as it is formulated as a 'meta principle' that does not talk about linguistic objects directly but rather about the lexical entries that license them. I show that, although its meaning cannot be expressed faithfully by the usual kind of constraints employed in HPSG, the Raising Principle can nevertheless be replaced by two such constraints which make largely the same predictions. Most importantly, these constraints interact with the output values of description-level lexical rules in the style of Meurers (2001) in a way that makes predictions available that Pollard & Sag (1994) intended the Raising Principle to make but that it cannot possibly make if description-level lexical rules are employed.

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Published

2009-10-15

How to Cite

Lahm, David. 2009. An alternative to the HPSG Raising Principle on the description-level. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar 192–212. (doi:10.21248/hpsg.2009.10) (https://proceedings.hpsg.xyz/article/view/720) (Accessed March 28, 2024.)