Towards a semantic analysis of argument/oblique alternations in HPSG

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DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21248/hpsg.2005.2

Abstract

I examine the semantic contrasts exhibited by argument/oblique alternations (argument realization alternations where one or more participants may be realized either as a direct argument or an oblique). Previous HPSG accounts of these have proposed that alternating verbs are ambiguous, where each variant has a structured semantics that makes different participants more or less structurally prominent in the semantic representation. I argue that such accounts fail to capture the full richness of the contrasts exhibited by such alternations, and propose instead a model that derives alternations from the lexical entailments each verb associates with the alternating participant.

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Published

2005-10-15

How to Cite

Beavers, John. 2005. Towards a semantic analysis of argument/oblique alternations in HPSG. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar 28–48. (doi:10.21248/hpsg.2005.2) (https://proceedings.hpsg.xyz/article/view/604) (Accessed March 28, 2024.)