263) and that the evidence from one language does not necessarily mean that the analysis for that language is also appropriate for another language. While I agree with this view in principle (see Section 13.1), I do think that extraction is a rather fundamental property of languages and that nonlocal dependencies should be analyzed in parallel for those languages that have it.

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Coordination**

One of the success stories of non-transformational grammar is the slash-based analysis of nonlocal dependencies by Gazdar (1981b). This analysis made it possible for the first time to explain Ross's Across the Board Extraction (Ross 1967: Section <IP_ADDRESS>). The examples were already discussed on page 201 and are repeated here for convenience:

(74) a. The kennel which Mary made and Fido sleeps in has been stolen.

(= S/NP & S/NP)

The generalization is that two (or more) constituents can be coordinated if they have identical syntactic categories and identical slash values. This explains why *which* and *in which* in (74a,b) can fill two positions in the respective clauses. Now, theories that do not use a slash feature for the percolation of information about missing elements have to find different ways to make sure that all argument slots are filled and that the correct correspondence between extracted elements and the respective argument role is established. Note that this is not straightforward in models like the one suggested by van Trijp, since he has to allow the preposition *in* to be combined with some material to the left of it that is simultaneously also the object of *made*. Usually an NP cannot simply be used by two different heads as their argument. As an example consider (75a):

	- b. John said about the cheese that I like it.

If it would be possible to use material several times, a structure for (75a) would be possible in which *the cheese* is the object of the preposition *about* and of the verb *like*. This sentence, however, is totally out: the pronoun *it* has to be used to fill the object slot.

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Discontinuous constituents and performance models**

Van Trijp points out that SBCG does not have a performance model and contrasts this with FCG. On page 252 he states:

So parsing starts by segmenting the utterance into discrete forms, which are then categorized into words by morphological and lexical constructions, and which can then be grouped together as phrases (see Steels, 2011b, for a detailed account of lexico-phrasal processing in FCG). So the parser will find similar constituents for all four utterances, as shown in examples (21–24). Since auxiliary-*do* in example (24) falls outside the immediate domain of the VP, it is not yet recognized as a member of the VP.

All of these phrases are disconnected, which means that the grammar still has to identify the relations between the phrases. (van Trijp 2014: 252)

In his (21)–(24), van Trijp provides several tree fragments that contain NPs for subject and object and states that these have to be combined in order to analyze the sentences he discusses. This is empirically inadequate: if FCG does not make the competence/performance distinction, then the way utterances are analyzed should reflect the way humans process language (and this is what is usually claimed about FCG). However, all we know about human language processing points towards an incremental processing, that is, we process information as soon as it is available. We start to process the first word taking into account all of the relevant aspects (phonology, stress, part of speech, semantics, information structure) and come up with an hypothesis about how the utterance could proceed. As soon as we have two words processed (in fact even earlier: integration already happens during the processing of words) we integrate the second word into what we know already and continue to follow our hypothesis, or revise it, or simply fail. See Section 15.2 for details on processing and the discussion of experiments that show that processing is incremental. So, we have to say that van Trijp's analysis fails on empirical grounds: his modeling of performance aspects is not adequate.

The parsing scheme that van Trijp describes is pretty much similar to those of computational HPSG parsers, but these usually come without any claims about human performance. Modeling human performance is rather complex since a lot of factors play a role. It is therefore reasonable to separate competence and performance and continue to work the way it is done in HPSG and FCG. This does not mean that performance aspects should not be modeled, in fact psycholinguistic models using HPSG have been developed in the past (Konieczny 1996), but developing both a grammar with large coverage and the performance model that combines with it demands a lot of resources.

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Discontinuity vs. Subject-Head and Head-Filler Schema**

I now turn to parsimony: van Trijp uses a subject-verb anchor construction that combines the subject and the main verb. Because of examples like (76) it must be possible to have discontinuous subject-verb constructions:31

(76) Peter often reads books.

	- b. Peter has read the book.

31Unless modals and tense auxiliaries are treated as main verbs (which they should not in English), constructions with modals seem to be another case where the subject and the main verb are not adjacent:

But if such constructions can be discontinuous one has to make sure that (77b) cannot be an instantiation of the subject-verb construction:

	- b. \* I the boy think left.

Here it is required to have some adjacency between the subject and the verb it belongs to, modulo some intervening adverbials. This is modeled quite nicely in phrase structure grammars that have a VP node. Whatever the internal structure of such a VP node may be, it has to be adjacent to the subject in sentences like (76) and (77a) above. The dislocated element has to be adjacent to the complex consisting of subject and VP. This is what the Filler-Head Schema does in HPSG and SBCG. Van Trijp criticizes SBCG for having to stipulate such a schema, but I cannot see how his grammar can be complete without a statement that ensures the right order of elements in sentences with fronted elements.

Van Trijp stated that FCG differs from what he calls generative approaches in that it does not want to characterize only the well-formed utterances of a language. According to him, the parsing direction is much more liberal in accepting input than other theories. So it could well be that he is happy to find a structure for (77b). Note though that this is incompatible with other claims made by van Trijp: he argued that FCG is superior to other theories in that it comes with a performance model (or rather in not separating competence from performance at all). But then (77b) should be rejected both on competence and performance grounds. It is just unacceptable and speakers reject it for whatever reasons. Any sufficiently worked out theory of language has to account for this.

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Restricting discontinuity**

There is a further problem related to discontinuity. If one does not restrict continuity, then constituent orders like (78b) are admitted by the grammar:

	- b. \* Deshalb therefore klärt resolves dass that ob whether Peter Peter Klaus Klaus kommt comes spielt. plays

The interesting thing about the word salad in (78b) is that the constituent order within the *dass* clause and within the *ob* clause is correct. That is, the complementizer precedes the subject, which in turn precedes the verb. The problem is that the constituents of the two clauses are mixed.

In a model that permits discontinuous constituents, one cannot require that all parts of an argument have to be arranged after all parts that belong to another argument since discontinuity is used to account for nonlocal dependencies. So, it must be possible to have *Klaus* before other arguments (or parts of other arguments) since *Klaus* can be extracted. An example of mixing parts of phrases is given in (79):

(79) Dieses this Buch book hat has der the Mann man mir me versprochen, promised seiner his Frau wife zu to geben, give der who gestern yesterday hier here aufgetreten performed ist. is

'The man who performed here yesterday promised me to give this book to his wife.'

We see that material that refers to *der Mann* 'the man', namely the relative clause *der gestern hier aufgetreten ist* 'who performed here yesterday', appears to the right. And the object of *geben* 'to give', which would normally be part of the phrase *dieses Buch seiner Frau zu geben* 'this book his wife to give' appears to the left. So, in general it is possible to mix parts of phrases, but this is possible in a very restricted way only. Some dependencies extend all the way to the left of certain units (fronting) and others all the way to the right (extraposition). Extraposition is clause-bound, while extraction is not. In approaches like GPSG, HPSG and SBCG, the facts are covered by assuming that constituents for a complete clause are continuous apart from constituents that are fronted or extraposed. The fronted and extraposed constituents are represented in slash and extra (Keller 1995; Müller 1999b: Section 13.2; Crysmann 2013), respectively, rather than in valence features, so that it is possible to require of constituents that have all their valents saturated to be continuous (Müller 1999c: 294).

Summing up the discussion of parsimony, it has to be said that van Trijp has to provide the details on how continuity is ensured. The formalization of this is not trivial and only after this is done can FCG be compared with the slash-based approach.

In addition to all the points discussed so far, there is a logical flaw in van Trijp's argumentation. He states that:

whereas the filler-gap analysis cannot explain why *do*-support does not occur in *wh*-questions where the subject is assigned questioning focus, this follows naturally from the interaction of different linguistic perspectives in this paper's approach. (van Trijp 2014: 263)

The issue here is whether a filler-gap analysis or an analysis with discontinuous constituents is suited better for explaining the data. A correct argumentation against the filler-gap analysis would require a proof that information structural or other functional constraints cannot be combined with this analysis. This proof was not provided and in fact I think it cannot be provided since there are approaches that integrate information structure. Simply pointing out that a theory is incomplete does not falsify a theory. This point was already made in my review of Boas (2003) and in a reply to Boas (2014). See Müller (2005a: 655–656), Müller (2007a: Chapter 20), and Müller & Wechsler (2014b: Footnote 15).

The conclusion about the FCG analysis of nonlocal dependencies is that there are some empirical flaws that can be easily fixed or assumptions that can simply be dropped (role of *do* as object marker, claim that the initial position in English fronting construction is the topic), some empirical shortcomings (coordination, admittance of illformed

utterances with discontinuous constituents), some empirical problems when the analysis is extended to other languages (scope of adjuncts in German), and the parsimony of the analyses is not really comparable since the restrictions on continuity are not really worked out (or at least not published). If the formalization of restrictions on continuity in FCG turns out to be even half as complex as the formalization that is necessary for accounts of nonlocal dependencies (extraction and extraposition) in linearization-based HPSG that Reape (2000) suggested,32 the slash-based analysis would be favorable.

In any case, I do not see how nonlocal dependencies could be used to drive a wedge between SBCG and FCG. If there are functional considerations that have to be taken into account, they should be modeled in both frameworks. In general, FCG should be more restrictive than SBCG since FCG claims to integrate a performance model, so both competence and performance constraints should be operative. I will come back to the competence/performance distinction in the following section, which is a more general comparison of SBCG and FCG.

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Comparison to Sign-Based Construction Grammar/HPSG**

According to van Trijp (2013), there are the differences shown in Table 10.1. These differences will be discussed in the following subsections.

Table 10.1: Differences between SBCG and FCG according to van Trijp (2013: 112)

<IP_ADDRESS>.1 Competence/performance distinction

As for the linguistic approach, the use of the term *generative* is confusing. What van Trijp means – and also explains in the paper – is the idea that one should separate

32See Kathol & Pollard (1995) for a linearization-based account of extraposition. This account is implemented in the Babel System (Müller 1996c). See (Müller 1999c) on restricting discontinuity. Linearization-based approaches were argued to not be able to account for apparent multiple frontings in German (Müller 2005c, 2023a) and hence linearization-based approaches were replaced by more traditional variants that allow for continuous constituents only.

competence and performance. We will deal with both the generative-enumerative vs. constraint-based view and with the competence/performance distinction in more detail in the Chapters 14 and 15, respectively. Concerning the cognitive-functional approach, van Trijp writes:

The goal of a cognitive-functional grammar, on the other hand, is to explain how speakers express their conceptualizations of the world through language (= *production*) and how listeners analyze utterances into meanings (= *parsing*). Cognitivefunctional grammars therefore implement both a competence and a processing model. (van Trijp 2013: 90)

It is true that HPSG and SBCG make a competence/performance distinction (Sag & Wasow 2011). HPSG theories are theories about the structure of utterances that are motivated by distributional evidence. These theories do not contain any hypothesis regarding brain activation, planning of utterances, processing of utterances (garden path effects) and similar things. In fact, none of the theories that are discussed in this book contains an explicit theory that explains all these things. I think that it is perfectly legitimate to work in this way: it is legitimate to study the structure of words without studying their semantics and pragmatics, it is legitimate to study phonology without caring about syntax, it is legitimate to deal with specific semantic problems without caring about phonology and so on, provided there are ways to integrate the results of such research into a bigger picture. In comparison, it is wrong to develop models like those developed in current versions of Minimalism (called Biolinguistics), where it is assumed that utterances are derived in phases (NPs, CPs, depending on the variant of the theory) and then shipped to the interfaces (spell out and semantic interpretation). This is not what humans do (see Chapter 15).33 But if we are neutral with respect towards such issues, we are fine. In fact, there is psycholinguistic work that couples HPSG grammars to performance models (Konieczny 1996) and similar work exists for TAG (Shieber & Johnson 1993, Demberg & Keller 2008).

Finally, there is also work in Construction Grammar that abstracts away from performance considerations. For instance, Adele Goldberg's book from 1995 does not contain a worked out theory of performance facts. It contains boxes in which grammatical functions are related to semantic roles. So this basically is a competence theory as well. Of course there are statements about how this is connected to psycholinguistic findings, but this is also true for theories like HPSG, SBCG and Simpler Syntax (Jackendoff 2011: 600) that explicitly make the competence/performance distinction.

### <IP_ADDRESS>.2 Mathematical formalization vs. implementation

The difference between mathematical and computational formalization is a rather strange distinction to make. I think that a formal and precise description is a prerequisite for implementation (see the discussion in Section 3.6.2 and Section 4.7.2). Apart from this, a computer implementation of SBCG is trivial, given the systems that we have for processing HPSG grammars. In order to show this, I want to address one issue that van Trijp

33Attempts to integrate current Minimalist theories with psycholinguistic findings (Phillips 2003) are incompatible with core principles of Minimalism like the *No Tampering Condition* of Chomsky (2008).

#### 10 Construction Grammar

discusses. He claims that SBCG cannot be directly implemented. On issues of complexity of constraint solving systems he quotes (Levine & Meurers 2006: Section 4.2.2):

Actual implementations of HPSG typically handle the problem by guiding the linguistic processor using a (rule-based) phrase structure backbone, but the disadvantage of this approach is that the "organization and formulation of the grammar is different from that of the linguistic theory" (Levine & Meurers 2006: Section 4.2.2). (van Trijp 2013: 108)

He concludes:

Applying all these observations to the operationalization of SBCG, we can conclude that an SBCG grammar is certainly amenable for computational implementation because of its formal explicitness. There are at least two computational platforms available, mostly used for implementing HPSG-based grammars, whose basic tenets are compatible with the foundations of SBCG: LKB (Copestake 2002) and TRALE (Richter 2006). However, none of these platforms supports a 'direct' implementation of an SBCG grammar as a general constraint system, so SBCG's performance-independence hypothesis remains conjecture until proven otherwise.

There are two issues that should be kept apart here: efficiency and faithfulness to the theory. First, as Levine and Meurers point out, there were many constraint solving systems at the beginning of the 90s. So there are computer systems that can and have been used to implement and process HPSG grammars. This is very valuable since they can be used for direct verification of specific theoretical proposals. As was discussed by Levine and Meurers, trying to solve constraints without any guidance is not the most efficient way to deal with the parsing/generation problem. Therefore, additional control-structure was added. This control structure is used for instance in a parser to determine the syntactic structure of a phrase and other constraints will apply as soon as there is sufficient information available for them to apply. For instance, the assignment of structural case happens once the arguments of a head are realized. Now, is it bad to have a phrase structure backbone? One can write down phrase structure grammars that use phrase structure rules that have nothing to do with what HPSG grammars usually do. The systems TRALE (Meurers, Penn & Richter 2002, Penn 2004) and LKB will process them. But one is not forced to do this. For instance, the grammars that I developed for the Core-Gram project (Müller 2013b, 2015c) are very close to the linguistic theory. To see that this is really the case, let us look at the Head-Argument Schema. The Head-Argument Schema is basically the type *head-argument-phrase* with certain type constraints that are partly inherited from its supertypes. The type with all the constraints was given on page 282 and is repeated here as (80):

(80) (syntactic) constraints on *head-complement-phrase*: *head-complement-phrase* synsem|loc|cat head 1 comps 2 head-dtr|synsem|loc|cat head 1 comps 2 ⊕ ⟨ 3 ⟩ non-head-dtrs ⟨ [ synsem 3 ] ⟩

This can be translated into phrase structure grammar rules in a straight-forward way:

The left hand side of the rule is the mother node of the tree, that is, the sign that is licensed by the schema provided that the daughters are present. The right hand side in (81a) consists of the head daughter 4 followed by the non-head daughter 5 . We have the opposite order in (81b), that is, the head daughter follows the non-head daughter. The two orders correspond to the two orders that are permitted by LP-rules: the head precedes its argument if it is marked initial+ and it follows it if it is marked initial−.

The following code shows how (81b) is implemented in TRALE:

```
arg_h rule (head_complement_phrase,
            synsem:loc:cat:head:initial:minus,
            head_dtr:HeadDtr,
            non_head_dtrs:[NonHeadDtr])
  ===>
cat> NonHeadDtr,
```
cat> HeadDtr.

A rule starts with an identifier that is needed for technical reasons like displaying intermediate structures in the parsing process in debugging tools. A description of the mother

#### 10 Construction Grammar

node follows and after the arrow we find a list of daughters, each introduced by the operator cat>. 34 Structure sharing is indicated by values with capital letters. The above TRALE rule is a computer-readable variant of (81b) additionally including the explicit specification of the value of initial.

Now, the translation of a parallel schema using a mother feature like (82a) into a phrase structure rule is almost as simple:

$$\begin{array}{l|l} \text{head-complement-cc} & \begin{bmatrix} \text{head-complement-cc} \\ \text{NOTHERS | SVSEM } \text{[LOC } \begin{bmatrix} \text{HEAAD} & \box{\Box} \\ \text{COMPS } \text{[}\Sigma\end{bmatrix} \end{bmatrix} \\\\ \text{HOAD-DTR} & \begin{bmatrix} \text{HEAAD} & \boxed{\text{HEAAD}} \\ \text{COMP-HEAD-DTR} \left\{ \begin{bmatrix} \text{HEAAD} & \boxed{\Box} \\ \text{COPS } \text{[}\Sigma\} \oplus \{\Box\} \end{bmatrix} \right\} \\\\ \text{NON-HEAD-DTR} & \left\{ \begin{bmatrix} \text{read-complement-cc} \\ \text{MOITHER} \left[ \text{[} \text{SYNSEM]LOC} \left\{ \text{CAT} \begin{bmatrix} \text{HEAAD} & \boxed{\Box} \\ \text{COPS } \text{[}\Sigma\end{bmatrix} \right\} \end{bmatrix} \right] \\\\ \text{b.} & \begin{bmatrix} \text{HEAAD-DTR} \left\{ \text{[} \text{SYNSEM]} \left\{ \text{LOC} \left| \text{CAT} \begin{bmatrix} \text{HEAAD} & \boxed{\Box} \\ \text{COPS } \text{[}\Sigma\} \oplus \{\Box\} \end{bmatrix} \right\} \end{bmatrix} \end{array} \end{array}$$

(82b) is only one of the two phrase structure rules that correspond to (82a), but since the other one only differs from (82b) in the ordering of 4 and 5 , it is not given here.

For grammars in which the order of the elements corresponds to the observable order of the daughters in a dtrs list, the connection to phrase structure rules is even simpler:

(83) 1 → 2 where *construction* mother 1 dtrs 2

The value of dtrs is a list and hence 2 stands for the list of daughters on the right hand side of the phrase structure rule as well. The type *construction* is a supertype of all constructions and hence (83) can be used to analyze all phrases that are licensed by the grammar. In fact, (83) is one way to put the meta constraint in (33).

So, this shows that the version of SBCG that has been developed by Sag (2012) has a straightforward implementation in TRALE.35 The question remains whether "SBCG's performance-independence hypothesis remains conjecture until proven otherwise" as

34Other operators are possible in TRALE. For instance, sem\_head can be used to guide the generator. This is control information that has nothing to do with linguistic theory and not necessarily with the way humans process natural language. There is also a cats operator, which precedes lists of daughters. This can be used to implement phrase structures with more than one non-head daughter.

35A toy fragment of English using a mother feature and phrase structure rules with specifications of the kind given above can be downloaded at https://hpsg.hu-berlin.de/Fragments/SBCG-TRALE/.

van Trijp sees it. The answer is: it is not a conjecture since any of the old constraintsolving systems of the nineties could be used to process SBCG. The question of whether this is efficient is an engineering problem that is entirely irrelevant for theoretical linguistics. Theoretical linguistics is concerned with human languages and how they are processed by humans. So whether some processing system that does not make any claims about human language processing is efficient or not is absolutely irrelevant. Phrase structure-based backbones are therefore irrelevant as well, provided they refer to the grammar as described in theoretical work.

Now, this begs the question whether there is a contradiction in my claims. On page 337 I pointed out that SBCG is lacking a formalization in Richter's framework (Richter 2004). Richter and also Levine & Meurers (2006) pointed out that there are problems with certain theoretically possible expressions and it is these expressions that mathematical linguists care about. So the goal is to be sure that any HPSG grammar has a meaning and that it is clear what it is. Therefore, this goal is much more foundational than writing a single grammar for a particular fragment of a language. There is no such foundational work for FCG since FCG is a specific toolkit that has been used to implement a set of grammars.

<IP_ADDRESS>.3 Static constraints vs. dynamic mappings and signature + grammar vs. openendedness

On very interesting feature of Fluid Construction Grammar is its fluidity, that is there are certain constraints that can be adapted if there is pressure, the inventory of the theory is open-ended, so categories and features can be added if need be.

Again, this is not a fundamental difference between HPSG/SBCG and FCG. An HPSG grammar fragment of a specific language is a declarative representation of linguistic knowledge and as such it of course just represents a certain fragment and does not contain any information how this set of constraints evolved or how it is acquired by speakers. For this we need specific theories about language evolution/language change/language acquisition. This is parallel to what was said about the competence/performance distinction, in order to account for language evolution we would have to have several HPSG grammars and say something about how one developed from the other. This will involve weighted constraints, it will involve recategorization of linguistic items and lots more.36 So basically HPSG has to be extended, has to be paired with a model about language evolution in the very same way as FCG is.

36There are systems that use weighted constraints. We had a simple version of this in the German HPSG grammar that was developed in Verb*mobil* project (Müller & Kasper 2000) already. Further theoretical approaches to integrate weighted constraints are Brew (1995) and more recently Guzmán Naranjo (2015). Usually such weighted constraints are not part of theoretical papers, but there are exceptions as for instance the paper by Briscoe and Copestake about lexical rules (Briscoe & Copestake 1999).

### <IP_ADDRESS>.4 Theoretical physics vs. Darwinian evolutionary theory

Van Trijp compares SBCG and FCG and claims that SBCG follows the model of theoretical physics – like Chomsky does –, while FCG adopts a Darwinian model of science – like Croft does –, the difference being that SBCG makes certain assumptions that are true of all languages, while FCG does not make any a priori assumptions. The fundamental assumptions made in both theories are that the objects that we model are best described by feature value pairs (a triviality). FCG assumes that there is always a syntactic and a semantic pole (fundamental assumption in the system) and researchers working in HPSG/SBCG assume that if languages have certain phenomena, they will be analyzed in similar ways. For instance, if a language has nonlocal dependencies, these will be analyzed via the slash mechanism. However, this does not entail that one believes that grammars of all languages have a slash feature. And in fact, there may even be languages that do not have valence features (Koenig & Michelson 2010), which may be a problem for FCG since it relies on the SYN-pole for the matching phase. So as far as SBCG is concerned, there is considerable freedom to choose features that are relevant in an analysis, and of course additional features and types can be assumed in case a language is found that provides evidence for this. The only example of a constraint provided by van Trijp that is possibly too strong is the locality constraint imposed by the mother feature. The idea about this feature is that everything that is of relevance in a more nonlocal context has to be passed up explicitly. This is done for nonlocal dependencies (via slash) and for instance also for information concerning the form of a preposition inside of a PP (via pform or more recently via form). Certain verbs require prepositional objects and restrict the form of the preposition. For instance, *wait* has to make sure that its prepositional object has the preposition *for* in it. Since this information is usually available only at the preposition, it has to be passed up to the PP level in order to be directly selectable by the governing verb.

### (84) I am waiting for my man.

So, assuming strict locality of selection requires that all phenomena that cannot be treated locally have to be analyzed by passing information up. Assuming strict locality is a design decision that does not have any empirical consequences, as far as it does not rule out any language or construction in principle. It just requires that information has to be passed up that needs to be accessed at higher nodes. As I have shown in Section 10.6.2, the locality constraint is easily circumvented even within SBCG and it makes the analysis of idioms unnecessarily complicated and unintuitive, so I suggest dropping the mother feature. But even if mother is kept, it is not justified to draw a distinction between SBCG and FCG along the lines suggested by van Trijp.

Independent of the mother issue, the work done in the CoreGram project (Müller 2013b, 2015c) shows that one can derive generalizations in a bottom-up fashion rather than imposing constraints on grammars in a top-down way. The latter paper discusses Croft's methodological considerations and shows how methodological pitfalls are circumvented in the project. HPSG/SBCG research differs from work in Chomskyan frameworks in not trying to show that all languages are like English or Romance or German or

whatever, rather languages are treated on their own as it is common in the Construction Grammar community. This does not imply that there is no interest in generalizations and universals or near universals or tendencies, but again the style of working and the rhetoric in HPSG/SBCG is usually different from the ones in Mainstream Generative Grammar. Therefore, I think that the purported difference between SBCG and FCG does not exist.

### <IP_ADDRESS>.5 Permissiveness of the theories

Van Trijp claims that HPSG/SBCG is a "generative grammar" since its aim is to account for and admit only grammatical sentences. FCG on the other hand is more permissive and tries to get the most out of the input even if it is fragmentary or ungrammatical (see also Steels 2013: 166). While it is an engineering decision to be able to parse ungrammatical input – and there are most certainly systems for the robust processing of HPSG grammars (Kiefer, Krieger & Nederhof 2000, Copestake 2007), it is also clear that humans cannot parse everything. There are strong constraints whose violations cause measurable effects in the brain. This is something that a model of language (that includes competence and performance factors or does not make the difference at all) has to explain. The question is what the cause of deviance is: is it processing complexity? Is it a category mismatch? A clash in information structure? So, if FCG permits structures that are not accepted by human native speakers and that do not make any sense whatsoever, additional constraints have to be added. If they are not added, the respective FCG theory is not an adequate theory of the language under consideration. Again, there is no difference between HPSG/SBCG and FCG.

### <IP_ADDRESS>.6 A note on engineering

A problematic property of work done in FCG is that linguistic and engineering aspects are mixed.37 Certain bookkeeping features that are needed only for technical reasons appear in linguistic papers, technical assumptions that are made to get a parser running are mixed with linguistic constraints. Bit vector encodings that are used to represent case information are part of papers about interesting case systems. There is certainly nothing wrong with bit vector encodings. They are used in HPSG implementations as well (Reape 1991: 55; Müller 1996c: 269), but this is not mixed into the theoretical papers.

It was a big breakthrough in the 80s when theoretical linguists and computational linguists started working together and developed declarative formalisms that were independent of specific parsers and processing systems. This made it possible to take over insights from a lot of linguists who were not concerned with the actual implementation but took care of finding linguistic generalizations and specifying constraints. Since this

37This is not a problem if all FCG papers are read as papers documenting the FCG-system (see Footnote 26 on page 346) since then it would be necessary to include these technical details. If the FCG papers are to be read as theoretical linguistics papers that document a certain Construction Grammar analysis, the Lisp statements and the implementational details are simply an obstacle.

separation is given up in FCG, it will remain an engineering project without much appeal to the general linguist.

# **10.7 Summary and classification**

There are currently three formalized variants of Construction Grammar: Sign-Based Construction Grammar, Embodied Construction Grammar, and Fluid Construction Grammar. The first two variants can be viewed as notational variants of (Constructional) HPSG (for SBCG with regard to this point, see Sag (2007: 411) and Sag (2010: 486)), or put differently, sister theories of HPSG. This is also true to a large extend for FCG, although van Trijp (2013) spends 25 pages working out the alleged differences. As I have shown in Section 10.6.4, HPSG and FCG are rather similar and I would say that these theories are sister theories as well.

Due to the origins of all three theories, respective analyses can differ quite considerably: HPSG is a strongly lexicalized theory, where phrasal dominance schemata have only been increasingly more used in the last ten years under the influence of Ivan Sag. The phrasal dominance schemata that Ivan Sag uses in his work are basically refinements of schemata that were present in earlier versions of HPSG. Crucially, all phenomena that interact with valence receive a lexical analysis (Sag, Boas & Kay 2012: Section 2.3). In CxG, on the other hand, predominantly phrasal analyses are adopted due to the influence of Adele Goldberg.

As already emphasized in Chapter 9, these are only tendencies that do not apply to all researchers working in the theories in question.

## **Exercises**

1. Find three examples of utterances whose meaning cannot be derived from the meaning of the individual words. Consider how one could analyze these examples in Categorial Grammar (yes, Categorial Grammar).

# **Further reading**

There are two volumes on Construction Grammar in German: Fischer & Stefanowitsch (2006) and Stefanowitsch & Fischer (2008). Deppermann (2006) discusses Construction Grammar from the point of view of conversational analysis. The 37(3) volume of the *Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik* from 2009 was also devoted to Construction Grammar. Goldberg (2003a) and Michaelis (2006) are overview articles in English. Goldberg's books constitute important contributions to Construction Grammar (1995, 2006, 2009). Goldberg (1995) has argued against lexical analyses such as those common in GB, LFG, CG, HPSG, and DG. These arguments can be invalidated, however, as will be shown in Section 21.7.1. Sag (1997), Borsley (2006), Jacobs (2008) and Müller & Lipenkova (2009) give examples of constructions that require a phrasal analysis if one wishes to avoid postulating empty elements. Jackendoff (2008) discusses the noun-prepositionnoun construction that can only be properly analyzed as a phrasal construction (see Section 21.10). The discussion on whether argument structure constructions should be analyzed phrasally or lexically (Goldberg 1995, 2006, Müller 2006) culminated in a series of papers (Goldberg 2013a) and a target article by Müller & Wechsler (2014a) with several responses in the same volume. Müller (2018a) discusses phrasal LFG approaches to benefactives and resultatives and compares them with lexical HPSG proposals showing one more time that phrasal approaches face problems. Müller (2021b) compares HPSG and Construction Grammar. The HPSG handbook (Müller et al. 2021) assumes Constructional HPSG (Sag 1997). The handbook has several chapters with sections in which Constructional HPSG is compared with Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2012).

Tomasello's publications on language acquisition (Tomasello 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006c) constitute a Construction Grammar alternative to the Principle & Parameters theory of acquisition as it does not have many of the problems that P&P analyses have (for more on language acquisition, see Chapter 16). For more on language acquisition and Construction Grammar, see Behrens (2009).

Dąbrowska (2004) looks at psycholinguistic constraints for possible grammatical theories.

# **11 Dependency Grammar**

Dependency Grammar (DG) is the oldest framework described in this book. According to Hudson (2021: 1452), the basic assumptions made today in Dependency Grammar were already present in the work of the Hungarian Sámuel Brassai in 1873 (see Imrényi 2013), the Russian Aleksej Dmitrievsky in 1877 and the German Franz Kern (1884). The most influential version of DG was developed by the French linguist Lucien Tesnière (1893– 1954). His foundational work *Eléments de syntaxe structurale* 'Elements of structural syntax' was basically finished in 1938 only three years after Ajdukiewicz's paper on Categorial Grammar (1935), but the publication was delayed until 1959, five years after his death. Since valence is central in Dependency Grammar, it is sometimes also referred to as Valence Grammar. Tesnière's ideas are wide-spread nowadays. The conceptions of valence and dependency are present in almost all of the current theories (Ágel & Fischer 2010: 262–263, 284).

Although there is some work on English (Anderson 1971, Hudson 1984), Dependency Grammar is most popular in central Europe and especially so in Germany (Engel 1996: 56–57). Ágel & Fischer (2010: 250) identified a possible reason for this: Tesnière's original work was not available in English until very recently (Tesnière 2015), but there has been a German translation for more than 35 years now (Tesnière 1980). Since Dependency Grammar focuses on dependency relations rather than linearization of constituents, it is often felt to be more appropriate for languages with freer constituent order, which is one reason for its popularity among researchers working on Slavic languages: the New Prague School represented by Sgall, Hajičová and Panevova developed Dependency Grammar further, beginning in the 1960s (see Hajičová & Sgall 2003 for an overview). Igor A. Meľčuk and A. K. Žolkovskij started in the 1960s in the Soviet Union to work on a model called Meaning–Text Theory, which was also used in machine translation projects (Mel'čuk 1964, 1981, 1988, Kahane 2003). Mel'čuk left the Soviet Union towards Canada in the 1970s and now works in Montréal.

Dependency Grammar is very wide-spread in Germany and among scholars of German linguistics worldwide. It is used very successfully for teaching German as a foreign language (Helbig & Buscha 1969, 1998). Helbig and Buscha, who worked in Leipzig, East Germany, started to compile valence dictionaries (Helbig & Schenkel 1969) and later researchers working at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Institute for German Language) in Mannheim began similar lexicographic projects (Schumacher et al. 2004).

The following enumeration is a probably incomplete list of linguists who are/were based in Germany: Vilmos Ágel (2000), Kassel; Klaus Baumgärtner (1965, 1970), Leipzig later Stuttgart; Ulrich Engel (1977, 2014), IDS Mannheim; Hans-Werner Eroms (1985, 1987, 2000), Passau; Heinz Happ, Tübingen; Peter Hellwig (1978, 2003), Heidelberg;

Jürgen Heringer (1996), Augsburg; Jürgen Kunze (1968, 1975), Berlin; Henning Lobin (1993), Gießen; Klaus Schubert (1987), Hildesheim; Heinz Josef Weber (1997), Trier; Klaus Welke (1988), Welke (2011), Humboldt University Berlin; Edeltraud Werner (1993), Halle-Wittenberg.

Although work has been done in many countries and continuously over the decades since 1959, a periodical international conference was established as late as 2011.1,2

From early on, Dependency Grammar was used in computational projects. Meľčuk worked on machine translation in the Soviet Union (Mel'čuk 1964) and David G. Hays worked on machine translation in the United States (Hays & Ziehe 1960). Jürgen Kunze, based in East Berlin at the German Academy of Sciences, where he had a chair for computational linguistics, also started to work on machine translation in the 1960s. A book that describes the formal background of the linguistic work was published as Kunze (1975). Various researchers worked in the Collaborative Research Center 100 *Electronic linguistic research* (SFB 100, Elektronische Sprachforschung) from 1973–1986 in Saarbrücken. The main topic of this SFB was machine translation as well. There were projects on Russian to German, French to German, English to German, and Esperanto to German translation. For work from Saarbrücken in this context see Klein (1971), Rothkegel (1976), and Weissgerber (1983). Muraki et al. (1985) used Dependency Grammar in a project that analyzed Japanese and generated English. Richard Hudson started to work in a dependency grammar-based framework called Word Grammar in the 1980s (Hudson 1984, 2007) and Sleator and Temperly have been working on Link Grammar since the 1990s (Sleator & Temperley 1991, Grinberg et al. 1995). Fred Karlsson's Constraint Grammars (1990) are developed for many languages (bigger fragments are available for Danish, Portuguese, Spanish, English, Swedish, Norwegian, French, German, Esperanto, Italian, and Dutch) and are used for school teaching, corpus annotation and machine translation. An online demo is available at the project website.3

In recent years, Dependency Grammar became more and more popular among computational linguists. The reason for this is that there are many annotated corpora (tree banks) that contain dependency information.4 Statistical parsers are trained on such tree banks (Yamada & Matsumoto 2003, Attardi 2006, Nivre 2003, Kübler et al. 2009, Bohnet 2010). Many of the parsers work for multiple languages since the general approach is language independent. It is easier to annotate dependencies consistently since there are fewer possibilities to do so. While syntacticians working in constituency-based models may assume binary branching or flat models, high or low attachment of adjuncts, empty elements or no empty elements and argue fiercely about this, it is fairly clear what the dependencies in an utterance are. Therefore it is easy to annotate consistently and train statistical parsers on such annotated data.

Apart from statistical modeling, there are also so-called deep processing systems, that is, systems that rely on a hand-crafted, linguistically motivated grammar. I already men-

1 http://depling.org/. 2018-02-20.

2A conference on Meaning–Text Theory has taken place biannually since 2003.

3 http://beta.visl.sdu.dk/constraint\_grammar. 2018-02-20.

4According to Kay (2000), the first treebank ever was developed by Hays and did annotate dependencies.

tioned Meľčuk's work in the context of machine translation; Hays & Ziehe (1960) had a parser for Russian; Starosta & Nomura (1986) developed a parser that was used with an English grammar, Jäppinen, Lehtola & Valkonen (1986) developed a parser that was demoed with Finnish, Hellwig (1986, 2003, 2006) implemented grammars of German in the framework of Dependency Unification Grammar, Hudson (1989) developed a Word Grammar for English, Covington (1990) developed a parser for Russian and Latin, which can parse discontinuous constituents, and Menzel (1998) implemented a robust parser of a Dependency Grammar of German. Other work on computational parsing to be mentioned is Kettunen (1986), Lehtola (1986), Menzel & Schröder (1998b). The following is a list of languages for which Dependency Grammar fragments exist:

#### 11 Dependency Grammar

The Constraint Grammar webpage5 additionally lists grammars for Basque, Catalan, English, Finnish, German, Italian, Sami, and Swedish.

# **11.1 General remarks on the representational format**

### **11.1.1 Valence information, nucleus and satellites**

The central concept of Dependency Grammar is valence (see Section 1.6). The central metaphor for this is the formation of stable molecules, which is explained in chemistry with reference to layers of electrons. A difference between chemical compounds and linguistic structures is that the chemical compounding is not directed, that is, it would not make sense to claim that oxygen is more important than hydrogen in forming water. In contrast to this, the verb is more important than the nominal phrases it combines with to form a complete clause. In languages like English and German, the verb determines the form of its dependents, for instance their case.

One way to depict dependencies is shown in Figure 11.1. The highest node is the verb *reads*. Its valence is a nominative NP (the subject) and an accusative NP (an object). This

Figure 11.1: Analysis of *The child reads a book.*

is depicted by the dependency links between the node representing the verb and the nodes representing the respective nouns. The nouns themselves require a determiner, which again is shown by the dependency links to *the* and *a* respectively. Note that the analysis presented here corresponds to the NP analysis that is assumed in HPSG for instance, that is, the noun selects its specifier (see Section 9.1.1). It should be noted, though, that the discussion whether an NP or a DP analysis is appropriate also took place within the Dependency Grammar community (Hudson 1984: 90; Van Langendonck 1994, Hudson 2004). See Engel (1977) for an analysis with the N as head and Welke (2011: 31) for an analysis with the determiner as head.

The verb is the head of the clause and the nouns are called *dependents*. Alternative terms for head and dependent are *nucleus* and *satellite*, respectively.

5 http://beta.visl.sdu.dk/constraint\_grammar\_languages.html, 2018-02-20.

An alternative way to depict the dependencies, which is used in the Dependency Grammar variant Word Grammar (Hudson 2007), is provided in Figure 11.2. This graph displays the grammatical functions rather than information about part of speech, but apart from this it is equivalent to the representation in Figure 11.1. The highest node in Figure 11.1 is labeled with the root arrow in Figure 11.2. Downward links are indicated by the direction of the arrows.

Figure 11.2: Alternative presentation of the analysis of *The child reads a book.*

A third form of representing the same dependencies provided in Figure 11.3 has the tree format again. This tree results if we pull the root node in Figure 11.2 upwards. Since we

Figure 11.3: Alternative presentation of the analysis of *The child reads a book.*

have a clear visualization of the dependency relation that represents the nucleus above the dependents, we do not need to use arrows to encode this information. However, some variants of Dependency Grammar – for instance Word Grammar – use mutual dependencies. So for instance, some theories assume that *his* depends on *child* and *child* depends on *his* in the analysis of *his child*. If mutual dependencies have to be depicted, either arrows have to be used for all dependencies or some dependencies are represented by downward lines in hierarchical trees and other dependencies by arrows.

Of course part of speech information can be added to the Figures 11.2 and 11.3, grammatical function labels could be added to Figure 11.1, and word order can be added to Figure 11.3.

The above figures depict the dependency relation that holds between a head and the respective dependents. This can be written down more formally as an -ary rule that is similar to phrase structure rules that were discussed in Chapter 2 (Gaifman 1965: 305; Hays 1964: 513; Baumgärtner 1970: 61; Heringer 1996: Section 4.1). For instance Baumgärtner suggests the general rule format in (1):

(1) → 1 . . . ∗ +2 . . . ,ℎ 0 < ≤

The asterisk in (1) corresponds to the word of the category . In our example, would be V, the position of the '∗' would be taken by *reads*, and 1 and 3 would be N. Together with the rule in (2b) for the determiner-noun combination, the rule in (2a) would license the dependency tree in Figure 11.1.

(2) a. V → N ∗ N b. N → D ∗

Alternatively, several binary rules can be assumed that combine a head with its subject, direct object, or indirect object (Kahane 2009). Dependency rules will be discussed in more detail in Section 11.7.2, where dependency grammars are compared with phrase structure grammars.

## **11.1.2 Adjuncts**

Another metaphor that was used by Tesnière is the drama metaphor. The core participants of an event are the *actants* and apart from this there is the background, the stage, the general setting. The actants are the arguments in other theories and the stagedescribing entities are called *circumstants*. These circumstants are modifiers and usually analyzed as adjuncts in the other theories described in this book. As far as the representation of dependencies is concerned, there is not much of a difference between arguments and adjuncts in Dependency Grammar. Figure 11.4 shows the analysis of (3):

(3) The child often reads the book slowly.

Figure 11.4: Analysis of *The child often reads the book slowly.*

The dependency annotation uses a technical device suggested by Engel (1977) to depict different dependency relations: adjuncts are marked with an additional line upwards from the adjunct node (see also Eroms 2000). An alternative way to specify the argument/adjunct, or rather the actant/circumstant distinction, is of course an explicit specification of the status as argument or adjunct. So one can use explicit labels for adjuncts

and arguments as it was done for grammatical functions in the preceding. German grammars and valence dictionaries often use the labels E and A for *Ergänzung* and *Angabe*, respectively.

### **11.1.3 Linearization**

So far we have seen dependency graphs that had connections to words that were linearized in a certain order. The order of the dependents, however, is in principle not determined by the dependency and therefore a Dependency Grammar has to contain additional statements that take care of the proper linearization of linguistic objects (stems, morphemes, words). Engel (2014: 50) assumes the dependency graph in Figure 11.5 for the sentences in (4).6

	- b. Ich I war was gestern yesterday bei with Tom. Tom
	- c. Bei with Tom Tom war was ich I gestern. yesterday
	- d. Ich I war was bei with Tom Tom gestern. yesterday

Figure 11.5: Dependency graph for several orders of *ich*, *war*, *bei Tom*, and *gestern* 'I was with Tom yesterday.' according to Engel (2014: 50)

According to Engel (2014: 50), the correct order is enforced by surface syntactic rules as for instance the rules that states that there is always exactly one element in the Vorfeld in declarative main clauses and that the finite verb is in second position.7,8 Furthermore,

6 Engel uses Esub for the subject and Eacc, Edat, and Egen for the objects with respective cases.

7 "Die korrekte Stellung ergibt sich dann zum Teil aus oberflächensyntaktischen Regeln (zum Beispiel: im Vorfeld des Konstativsatzes steht immer genau ein Element; das finite Verb steht an zweiter Stelle) […]"

8 Engel (1970: 81) provides counterexamples to the claim that there is exactly one element in the *Vorfeld*. Related examples will be discussed in Section 11.7.1.

#### 11 Dependency Grammar

there are linearization rules that concern pragmatic properties, as for instance given information before new information. Another rule ensures that weak pronouns are placed into the Vorfeld or at the beginning of the Mittelfeld. This conception of linear order is problematic both for empirical and conceptual reasons and we will turn to it again in Section 11.7.1. It should be noted here that approaches that deal with dependency alone admit discontinuous realizations of heads and their dependents. Without any further constraints, Dependency Grammars would share a problem that was already discussed on page 343 in Section 10.6.3 on Embodied Construction Grammar and in Section <IP_ADDRESS> with respect to Fluid Construction Grammar: one argument could interrupt another argument as in Figure 11.6. In order to exclude such linearizations in languages in which

Figure 11.6: Unwanted analysis of *dass die Frauen Türen öffnen* 'that the women open doors'

they are impossible, it is sometimes assumed that analyses have to be projective, that is crossing branches like those in Figure 11.6 are not allowed. This basically reintroduces the concept of constituency into the framework, since this means that all dependents of a head have to be realized close to the head unless special mechanisms for liberation are used (see for instance Section 11.5 on nonlocal dependencies).9 Some authors explicitly use a phrase structure component to be able to formulate restrictions on serializations of constituents (Gerdes & Kahane 2001, Hellwig 2003).

### **11.1.4 Semantics**

Tesnière already distinguished the participants of a verb in a way that was later common in theories of semantic roles. He suggested that the first actant is the agent, the second one a patient and the third a benefactive (Tesnière 2015: Chapter 106). Given that Dependency Grammar is a lexical framework, all lexical approaches to argument linking can

9While this results in units that are also assumed in phrase structure grammars, there is a difference: the units have category labels in phrase structure grammars (for instance NP), which is not the case in Dependency Grammars. In Dependency Grammars, one just refers to the label of the head (for instance the N that belongs to *child* in Figure 11.4) or one refers to the head word directly (for instance, the word *child* in Figure 11.3). So there are fewer nodes in Dependency Grammar representations (but see the discussion in Section <IP_ADDRESS>).

be adopted. However, argument linking and semantic role assignment are just a small part of the problem that has to be solved when natural language expressions have to be assigned a meaning. Issues regarding the scope of adjuncts and quantifiers have to be solved and it is clear that dependency graphs representing dependencies without taking into account linear order are not sufficient. An unordered dependency graph assigns grammatical functions to a dependent of a head and hence it is similar in many respects to an LFG f-structure.10 For a sentence like (25a) on page 232, repeated here as (5), one gets the f-structure in (25b) on page 232. This f-structure contains a subject (*David*), an object (*a sandwich*), and an adjunct set with two elements (*at noon* and *yesterday*).

(5) David devoured a sandwich at noon yesterday.

This is exactly what is encoded in an unordered dependency graph. Because of this parallel it comes as no surprise that Bröker (2003: 308) suggested to use glue semantics (Dalrymple, Lamping & Saraswat 1993; Dalrymple 2001: Chapter 8) for Dependency Grammar as well. Glue semantics was already introduced in Section 7.1.5.

There are some variants of Dependency Grammar that have explicit treatments of semantics. One example is Meaning–Text Theory (Mel'čuk 1988). Word Grammar is another one (Hudson 1990: Chapter 7; 2007: Chapter 5). The notations of these theories cannot be introduced here. It should be noted though that theories like Hudson's Word Grammar are rather rigid about linear order and do not assume that all the sentences in (4) have the same dependency structure (see Section 11.5). Word Grammar is closer to phrase structure grammar and therefore can have a semantics that interacts with constituent order in the way it is known from constituent-based theories.

# **11.2 Passive**

Dependency Grammar is a lexical theory and valence is the central concept. For this reason, it is not surprising that the analysis of the passive is a lexical one. That is, it is assumed that there is a passive participle that has a different valence requirement than the active verb (Hudson 1990: Chapter 12; Eroms 2000: Section 10.3; Engel 2014: 53–54).

Our standard example in (6) is analyzed as shown in Figure 11.7 on the next page.

(6) [dass] that der the Weltmeister world.champion geschlagen beaten wird is

'that the world champion is (being) beaten'

This figure is an intuitive depiction of what is going on in passive constructions. A formalization would probably amount to a lexical rule for the personal passive. See Hellwig (2003: 629–630) for an explicit suggestion of a lexical rule for the analysis of the passive in English.

Note that *der Weltmeister* 'the world champion' is not an argument of the passive auxiliary *wird* 'is' in Engel's analysis. This means that subject–verb agreement cannot be

10Tim Osborne (p. c. 2015) reminds me that this is not true in all cases: for instance non-predicative prepositions are not reflected in f-structures, but of course they are present in dependency graphs.

#### 11 Dependency Grammar

Figure 11.7: Analysis of [*dass*] *der Weltmeister geschlagen wird* 'that the world champion is (being) beaten' parallel to the analyses provided by Engel (2014: 53–54)

determined locally and some elaborated mechanism has to be developed for ensuring agreement.11 Hudson (1990), Eroms (2000: Section 5.3) and Groß & Osborne (2009) assume that subjects depend on auxiliaries rather than on the main verb. This requires some argument transfer as it is common in Categorial Grammar (see Section 8.5.2) and HPSG (Hinrichs & Nakazawa 1994a). The adapted analysis that treats the subject of the participle as a subject of the auxiliary is given in Figure 11.8 on the facing page.

11This problem would get even more pressing for cases of the so-called remote passive:

Here the object of *zu reparieren*, which is the object of a verb which is embedded two levels deep, agrees with the auxiliaries *wurde* 'was' and *wurden* 'were'. However, the question how to analyze these remote passives is open in Engel's system anyway and the solution of this problem would probably involve the mechanism applied in HPSG: the arguments of *zu reparieren* are raised to the governing verb *versucht*, passive applies to this verb and turns the object into a subject which is then raised by the auxiliary. This explains the agreement between the underlying object of *zu reparieren* 'to repair' and *wurde* 'was'. Hudson (1997), working in the framework of Word Grammar, suggests an analysis of verbal complementation in German that involves what he calls *generalized raising*. He assumes that both subjects and complements may be raised to the governing head. Note that such an analysis involving generalized raising would make an analysis of sentences like (i) straightforward, since the object would depend on the same head as the subject, namely on *hat* 'has' and hence can be placed before the subject.

(ii) Gestern yesterday hat has sich self der the Spieler player verletzt. injured 'The player injured himself yesterday.'

For a discussion of Groß & Osborne's account of (ii) see page 598.

Figure 11.8: Analysis of [*dass*] *der Weltmeister geschlagen wird* 'that the world champion is (being) beaten' with the subject as dependent of the auxiliary

# **11.3 Verb position**

In many Dependency Grammar publications on German, linearization issues are not dealt with and authors just focus on the dependency relations. The dependency relations between a verb and its arguments are basically the same in verb-initial and verbfinal sentences. If we compare the dependency graphs of the sentences in (7) given in the Figures 11.9 and 11.10, we see that only the position of the verb is different, but the dependency relations are the same, as it should be.12

	- b. Kennt knows jeder everybody diesen this Mann? man 'Does everybody know this man?'

The correct ordering of the verb with respect to its arguments and adjuncts is ensured by linearization constraints that refer to the respective topological fields. See Section 11.1.3 and Section 11.7.1 for further details on linearization.

12Eroms (2000) uses the part of speech Pron for pronouns like *jeder* 'everybody'. If information about part of speech plays a role in selection, this makes necessary a disjunctive specification of all valence frames of heads that govern nominal expressions, since they can either combine with an NP with internal structure or with a pronoun. By assigning pronouns the category N, such a disjunctive specification is avoided. A pronoun differs from a noun in its valence (it is fully saturated, while a noun needs a determiner), but not in its part of speech. Eroms & Heringer (2003: 259) use the symbol N\_pro for pronouns. If the pro-part is to be understood as a special property of items with the part of speech N, this is compatible with what I have said above: heads could then select for Ns. If N\_pro and N are assumed to be distinct atomic symbols, the problem remains.

Using N rather than Pron as part of speech for pronouns is standard in other versions of Dependency Grammar, as for instance Word Grammar (Hudson 1990: 167; Hudson 2007: 190). See also footnote 2 on page 53 on the distinction of pronouns and NPs in phrase structure grammars.

#### 11 Dependency Grammar

Figure 11.9: Analysis of [*dass*] *jeder diesen Mann kennt* 'that everybody knows this man'

Figure 11.10: Analysis of *Kennt jeder diesen Mann?* 'Does everybody know this man?'

# **11.4 Local reordering**

The situation regarding local reordering is the same. The dependency relations of the sentence in (8b) are shown in Figure 11.11 on the next page. The analysis of the sentence with normal order in (8a) has already been given in Figure 11.9.

	- b. [dass] that diesen this Mann man jeder everybody kennt knows 'that everybody knows this man'

Figure 11.11: Analysis of [*dass*] *diesen Mann jeder kennt* 'that everybody knows this man'

Figure 11.12: Analysis of *Diesen Mann kennt jeder.* 'This man, everybody knows.' without special treatment of fronting

# **11.5 Long-distance dependencies**

There are several possibilities to analyze nonlocal dependencies in Dependency Grammar. The easiest one is the one we have already seen in the previous sections. Many analyses just focus on the dependency relations and assume that the order with the verb in second position is just one of the possible linearization variants (Eroms 2000: Section 9.6.2; Groß & Osborne 2009). Figure 11.12 shows the analysis of (9):

(9) [Diesen this Mann] man kennt knows jeder. everybody 'Everyone knows this man.'

Now, this is the simplest case, so let us look at the example in (10), which really involves a *nonlocal* dependency:

#### 11 Dependency Grammar

(10) Wen who.acc glaubst believe.2sg du, you.nom daß that ich I.nom \_ gesehen seen habe?13 have 'Who do you think I saw?'

The dependency relations are depicted in Figure 11.13. This graph differs from most

Figure 11.13: Non-projective analysis of *Wen glaubst du, dass ich gesehen habe?* 'Who do you think I saw?'

graphs we have seen before in not being projective. This means that there are crossing lines: the connection between Vprt and the N for *wen* 'who' crosses the lines connecting *glaubst* 'believe' and *du* 'you' with their category symbols. Depending on the version of Dependency Grammar assumed, this is seen as a problem or it is not. Let us explore the two options: if discontinuity of the type shown in Figure 11.13 is allowed for as in Heringer's and Eroms' grammars (Heringer 1996: 261; Eroms 2000: Section 9.6.2),14there has to be something in the grammar that excludes discontinuities that are ungrammatical. For instance, an analysis of (11) as in Figure 11.14 on the next page should be excluded.

(11) \* Wen who.acc glaubst believe.2sg ich I.nom du, you.nom dass that gesehen seen habe? have Intended: 'Who do you think I saw?'

Note that the order of elements in (11) is compatible with statements that refer to topological fields as suggested by Engel (2014: 50): there is a *Vorfeld* filled by *wen* 'who', there is a left sentence bracket filled by *glaubst* 'believe', and there is a *Mittelfeld* filled by *ich* 'I', *du* 'you' and the clausal argument. Having pronouns like *ich* and *du* in the *Mittelfeld* is

13Scherpenisse (1986: 84).

14However, the authors mention the possibility of raising an extracted element to a higher node. See for instance Eroms & Heringer (2003: 260).

Figure 11.14: Unwanted dependency graph of \* *Wen glaubst ich du, dass gesehen habe?* 'Who do you think I saw?'

perfectly normal. The problem is that these two pronouns come from different clauses: *du* belongs to the matrix verb *glaubst* 'believe' while *ich* 'I' depends on *gesehen* 'seen' *habe* 'have'. What has to be covered by a theory is the fact that fronting and extraposition target the left-most and right-most positions of a clause, respectively. This can be modeled in constituency-based approaches in a straightforward way, as has been shown in the previous chapters.

As an alternative to discontinuous constituents, one could assume additional mechanisms that promote the dependency of an embedded head to a higher head in the structure. Such an analysis was suggested by Kunze (1968), Hudson (1997, 2000), Kahane (1997), Kahane et al. (1998), and Groß & Osborne (2009). In what follows, I use the analysis by Groß & Osborne (2009) as an example for such analyses. Groß & Osborne depict the reorganized dependencies with a dashed line as in Figure 11.15.15,16 The origin of the dependency (Vprt) is marked with a *g* and the dependent is connected to the node to which it has risen (the topmost V) by a dashed line. Instead of realizing the accusative dependent of *gesehen* 'seen' locally, information about the missing element is transferred to a higher node and realized there.

The analysis of Groß & Osborne (2009) is not very precise. There is a and there is a dashed line, but sentences may involve multiple nonlocal dependencies. In (12) for instance, there is a nonlocal dependency in the relative clauses *den wir alle begrüßt haben*

15Eroms & Heringer (2003: 260) make a similar suggestion but do not provide any formal details.

16Note that Groß & Osborne (2009) do not assume a uniform analysis of simple and complex V2 sentences. That is, for cases that can be explained as local reordering they assume an analysis without rising. Their analysis of (9) is the one depicted in Figure 11.12. This leads to problems which will be discussed in Section 11.7.1.

Figure 11.15: Projective analysis of *Wen glaubst du, dass ich gesehen habe?* 'Who do you think I saw?' involving rising

'who we all greeted have' and *die noch niemand hier gesehen hat* 'who yet nobody here seen has': the relative pronouns are fronted inside the relative clauses. The phrase *dem Mann, den wir alle kennen* 'the man who we all know' is the fronted dative object of *gegeben* 'given' and *die noch niemand hier gesehen hat* 'who yet nobody here seen has' is extraposed from the NP headed by *Frau* 'woman'.

So this means that the connections (dependencies) between the head and the dislocated element have to be made explicit. This is what Hudson (1997, 2000) does in his Word Grammar analysis of nonlocal dependencies: in addition to dependencies that relate a word to its subject, object and so on, he assumes further dependencies for extracted elements. For example, *wen* 'who' in (10) – repeated here as (13) for convenience – is the object of *gesehen* 'seen' and the extractee of *glaubst* 'believe' and *dass* 'that':

(13) Wen who glaubst believe du, you dass that ich I gesehen seen habe? have 'Who do you believe that I saw?'

Hudson states that the use of multiple dependencies in Word Grammar corresponds to structure sharing in HPSG (Hudson 1997: 15). Nonlocal dependencies are modeled as a series of local dependencies as it is done in GPSG and HPSG. This is important since it allows one to capture extraction path marking effects (Bouma, Malouf & Sag 2001: 1–2, Section 3.2): for instance, there are languages that use a special form of the complementizer for sentences from which an element is extracted. Figure 11.16 shows the analysis of (13) in Word Grammar. The links above the words are the usual dependency

Figure 11.16: Projective analysis of *Wen glaubst du, dass ich gesehen habe?* 'Who do you think I saw?' in Word Grammar involving multiple dependencies

links for subjects (s) and objects (o) and other arguments (r is an abbreviation for *sharer*, which refers to verbal complements, l stands for *clausal complement*) and the links below the words are links for extractees (x<). The link from *gesehen* 'seen' to *wen* 'who' is special since it is both an object link and an extraction link (x<o). This link is an explicit statement which corresponds to both the little and the N that is marked by the dashed line in Figure 11.15. In addition to what is there in Figure 11.15, Figure 11.16 also has an extraction link from *dass* 'that' to *wen* 'who'. One could use the graphic representation of Engel, Eroms, and Gross & Osborne to display the Word Grammar dependencies: one would simply add dashed lines from the V node and from the Subjunction node to the N node dominating *wen* 'who'.

While this looks simple, I want to add that Word Grammar employs further principles that have to be fulfilled by well-formed structures. In the following I explain the *Notangling Principle*, the *No-dangling Principle* and the *Sentence-root Principle*.

**Principle 1 (The No-tangling Principle)** *Dependency arrows must not tangle.*

**Principle 2 (The No-dangling Principle)** *Every word must have a parent.*

**Principle 3 (The Sentence-root Principle)** *In every non-compound sentence there is just one word whose parent is not a word but a contextual element.*

The No-tangling Principle ensures that there are no crossing dependency lines, that is, it ensures that structures are projective (Hudson 2000: 23). Since non-local dependency relations are established via the specific dependency mechanism, one wants to rule out the non-projective analysis. This principle also rules out (14b), where *green* depends on *peas* but is not adjacent to *peas*. Since *on* selects *peas* the arrow from *on* to *peas* would cross the one from *peas* to *green*.

	- b. \* He lives green on peas.

The No-dangling Principle makes sure that there are no isolated word groups that are not connected to the main part of the structure. Without this principle (14b) could be analyzed with the isolated word *green* (Hudson 2000: 23).

The Sentence-root Principle is needed to rule out structures with more than one highest element. *glaubst* 'believe' is the root in Figure 11.16. There is no other word that dominates it and selects for it. The principle makes sure that there is no other root. So the principle rules out situations in which all elements in a phrase are roots, since otherwise the No-dangling Principle would lose its force as it could be fulfilled trivially (Hudson 2000: 25).

I added this rather complicated set of principles here in order to get a fair comparison with phrase structure-based proposals. If continuity is assumed for phrases in general, the three principles do not have to be stipulated. So, for example, LFG and HPSG do not need these three principles.

Note that Hudson (1997: 16) assumes that the element in the *Vorfeld* is extracted even for simple sentences like (9). I will show in Section 11.7.1 why I think that this analysis has to be preferred over analyses assuming that simple sentences like (9) are just order variants of corresponding verb-initial or verb-final sentences.

# **11.6 New developments and theoretical variants**

This section and the following one are for advanced readers. The present section mainly deals with Tesnière's variant of Dependency Grammar. Section 11.6.1 deals with Tesnière's part of speech system and Section 11.6.2 describes the modes of combinations of linguistics objects assumed by Tesnière. Reading this section is not necessary for a basic understanding of Dependency Grammar.

# **11.6.1 Tesnière's part of speech classification**

As mentioned in the introduction, Tesnière is a central figure in the history of Dependency Grammar as it was him who developed the first formal model (Tesnière 1959, 1980, 2015). There are many versions of Dependency Grammar today and most of them use the part of speech labels that are used in other theories as well (N, P, A, V, Adv, Conj, …). Tesnière had a system of four major categories: noun, verb, adjective, and adverb. The labels for these categories were derived from the endings that are used in Esperanto, that is, they are O, I, A, and E, respectively. These categories were defined semantically as

Table 11.1: Semantically motivated part of speech classification by Tesnière

specified in Table 11.1.17 Tesnière assumed these categories to be universal and suggested that there are constraints in which way these categories may depend on others.

According to Tesnière, nouns and adverbs may depend on verbs, adjectives may depend on nouns, and adverbs may depend on adjectives or adverbs. This situation is depicted in the general dependency graph in Figure 11.17. The '\*' means that there can be an arbitrary number of dependencies between Es. It is of course easy to find examples

Figure 11.17: Universal configuration for dependencies according to Tesnière (I = verb, O = noun, A = adjective, E = adverb)

in which adjectives depend on verbs and sentences (verbs) depend on nouns. Such cases are handled via so-called *transfers* in Tesnière's system. Furthermore, conjunctions, determiners, and prepositions are missing from this set of categories. For the combination of these elements with their dependents Tesnière used special combinatoric relations: junction and transfer. We will deal with these in the following subsection.

17As Weber (1997: 77) points out this categorization is not without problems: in what sense is *Angst* 'fear' a substance? Why should *glauben* 'believe' be a concrete process? See also Klein (1971: Section 3.4) for the discussion of *schlagen* 'to beat' and *Schlag* 'the beat' and similar cases. Even if one assumes that *Schlag* is derived from the concrete process *schlag*- by a transfer into the category O, the assumption that such Os stand for concrete substances is questionable.

## **11.6.2 Connection, junction, and transfer**

Tesnière (1959) suggested three basic relations between nodes: connection, junction, and transfer. Connection is the simple relation between a head and its dependents that we have already covered in the previous sections. Junction is a special relation that plays a role in the analysis of coordination and transfer is a tool that allows one to change the category of a lexical item or a phrase.

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Junction**

Figure 11.18 illustrates the junction relation: the two conjuncts *John* and *Mary* are connected with the conjunction *and*. It is interesting to note that both of the conjuncts are connected to the head *laugh*.

Figure 11.18: Analysis of coordination using the special relation *junction*

In the case of two coordinated nouns we get dependency graphs like the one in Figure 11.19. Both nouns are connected to the dominating verb and both nouns dominate the same determiner.

Figure 11.19: Analysis of coordination using the special relation *junction*

An alternative to such a special treatment of coordination would be to treat the conjunction as the head and the conjuncts as its dependents.18 The only problem of such a proposal would be the category of the conjunction. It cannot be Conj since the governing

18I did not use Tesnière's category labels here to spare the reader the work of translating I to V and O to N.

verb does not select a Conj, but an N. The trick that could be applied here is basically the same trick as in Categorial Grammar (see Section 21.6.2): the category of the conjunction in Categorial Grammar is (X\X)/X. We have a functor that takes two arguments of the same category and the result of the combination is an object that has the same category as the two arguments. Translating this approach to Dependency Grammar, one would get an analysis as the one depicted in Figure 11.20 rather than the ones in Figure 11.18 and Figure 11.19. The figure for *all girls and boys* looks rather strange since both the

Figure 11.20: Analysis of coordination without *junction* and the conjunction as head

determiner and the two conjuncts depend on the conjunction, but since the two Ns are selecting a Det, the same is true for the result of the coordination. In Categorial Grammar notation, the category of the conjunction would be ((NP\Det)\(NP\Det))/(NP\Det) since X is instantiated by the nouns which would have the category (NP\Det) in an analysis in which the noun is the head and the determiner is the dependent.

Note that both approaches have to come up with an explanation of subject–verb agreement. Tesnière's original analysis assumes two dependencies between the verb and the individual conjuncts.19 As the conjuncts are singular and the verb is plural, agreement cannot be modeled in tandem with dependency relations in this approach. If the second analysis finds ways of specifying the agreement properties of the coordination in the conjunction, the agreement facts can be accounted for without problems.

The alternative to a headed approach as depicted in Figure 11.20 is an unheaded one. Several authors working in phrase structure-based frameworks suggested analyses of coordination without a head. Such analyses are also assumed in Dependency Grammar (Hudson 1988, Kahane 1997). Hudson (1988) and others who make similar assumptions assume a phrase structure component for coordination: the two nouns and the conjunction are combined to form a larger object which has properties which do not correspond to the properties of any of the combined words.

Similarly, the junction-based analysis of coordination poses problems for the interpretation of the representations. If semantic role assignment happens in parallel to dependency relations, there would be a problem with graphs like the one in Figure 11.18, since

19Eroms (2000: 467) notes the agreement problem and describes the facts. In his analysis, he connects the first conjunct to the governing head, although it seems to be more appropriate to assume an internally structured coordination structure and then connect the highest conjunction.

#### 11 Dependency Grammar

the semantic role of *laugh* cannot be filled by *John* and *Mary* simultaneously. Rather it is filled by one entity, namely the one that refers to the set containing John and Mary. This semantic representation would belong to the phrase *John and Mary* and the natural candidate for being the topmost entity in this coordination is *and*, as it embeds the meaning of *John* and the meaning of *Mary*: *and*′ (*John*′ , *Mary*′ ).

Such junctions are also assumed for the coordination of verbs. This is, however, not without problems, since adjuncts can have scope over the conjunct that is closest to them or over the whole coordination. An example is the following sentence from Levine (2003: 217):

(15) Robin came in, found a chair, sat down, and whipped off her logging boots in exactly thirty seconds flat.

The adjunct *in exactly thirty seconds flat* can refer either to *whipped off her logging boots* as in (16a) or scope over all three conjuncts together as in (16b):

	- b. Robin [[came in, found a chair, sat down, and pulled off her logging boots] in exactly thirty seconds flat].

The Tesnièreian analysis in Figure 11.21 corresponds to (17), while an analysis that treats the conjunction as the head as in Figure 11.22 on the next page corresponds to (16b).

(17) Robin came in in exactly thirty seconds flat and Robin found a chair in exactly thirty seconds flat and Robin pulled off her logging boots in exactly thirty seconds flat.

The reading in (17) results when an adjunct refers to each conjunct individually rather then referring to a cumulative event that is expressed by a verb phrase as in (16b).

Figure 11.21: Analysis of verb coordination involving the junction relation

Figure 11.22: Analysis of verb coordination involving the connection relation

Levine (2003: 217) discusses these sentences in connection to the HPSG analysis of extraction by Bouma, Malouf & Sag (2001). Bouma, Malouf & Sag suggest an analysis in which adjuncts are introduced lexically as dependents of a certain head. Since adjuncts are introduced lexically, the coordination structures basically have the same structure as the ones assumed in a Tesnièreian analysis. It may be possible to come up with a way to get the semantic composition right even though the syntax does not correspond to the semantic dependencies (see Chaves 2009 for suggestions), but it is clear that it is simpler to derive the semantics from a syntactic structure which corresponds to what is going on in semantics.

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Transfer**

Transfers are used in Tesnière's system for the combination of words or phrases with a head of one of the major categories (for instance nouns) with words in minor categories (for instance prepositions). In addition, transfers can transfer a word or phrase into another category without any other word participating.

Figure 11.23 shows an example of a transfer. The preposition *in* causes a category change: while *Traumboot* 'dream boat' is an O (noun), the combination of the preposition and the noun is an E. The example shows that Tesnière used the grammatical category to encode grammatical functions. In theories like HPSG there is a clear distinction: there is information about part of speech on the one hand and the function of elements as modifiers and predicates on the other hand. The modifier function is encoded by the selectional feature mod, which is independent of the part of speech. It is therefore possible to have modifying and non-modifying adjectives, modifying and non-modifying prepositional phrases, modifying and non-modifying noun phrases and so on. For the example at hand, one would assume a preposition with directional semantics that selects for an NP. The preposition is the head of a PP with a filled mod value.

#### 11 Dependency Grammar

Figure 11.23: Transfer with an example adapted from Weber (1997: 83)

Another area in which transfer is used is morphology. For instance, the derivation of French *frappant* 'striking' by suffixation of -*ant* to the verb stem *frapp* is shown in Figure 11.24. Such transfers can be subsumed under the general connection relation if the

Figure 11.24: Transfer in morphology and its reconceptualization as normal dependency

affix is treated as the head. Morphologists working in realizational morphology and construction morphology argue against such morpheme-based analyses since they involve a lot of empty elements for conversions as for instance the conversion of the verb *play* into the noun *play* (see Figure 11.25). Consequently, lexical rules are assumed for derivations and conversions in theories like HPSG. HPSG lexical rules are basically equivalent to unary branching rules (see the discussion of (41) on page 292 and Section 19.5). The affixes are integrated into the lexical rules or into realization functions that specify the morphological form of the item that is licensed by the lexical rule.

Figure 11.25: Conversion as transfer from I (verb) to O (substantive) and as dependency with an empty element of the category N as head

Concluding it can be said that transfer corresponds to

For further discussion of the relation between Tesnière's transfer rules and constituency rules see Kahane & Osborne (2015: Section 4.9.1–4.9.2). Kahane & Osborne point out that transfer rules can be used to model exocentric constructions, that is, constructions in which there is no single part that could be identified as the head. For more on headless constructions see Section <IP_ADDRESS>.

# **11.6.3 Scope**

As Kahane & Osborne (2015: lix) point out, Tesnière uses so-called polygraphs to represent scopal relations. So, since *that you saw yesterday* in (18) refers to *red cars* rather than *cars* alone, this is represented by a line that starts at the connection between *red* and *cars* rather than on one of the individual elements (Tesnière 2015: 150, Stemma 149).

(18) red cars that you saw yesterday

Tesnière's analysis is depicted in the left representation in Figure 11.26. It is worth noting that this representation corresponds to the phrase structure tree on the right of Figure 11.26. The combination B between *red* and *cars* corresponds to the B node in the righthand figure and the combination A of *red cars* and *that you saw yesterday* corresponds to the A node. So, what is made explicit and is assigned a name in phrase structure grammars remains nameless in Tesnière's analysis, but due to the assumption of polygraphs, it is possible to refer to the combinations. See also the discussion of Figure 11.46, which shows additional nodes that Hudson assumes in order to model semantic relations.

Figure 11.26: Tesnière's way of representing scope and the comparison with phrase structure-based analyses by Kahane & Osborne (2015: lix)

# **11.7 Summary and classification**

This section is for advanced readers. It compares Dependency Grammar to phrase structure grammars.

Proponents of Dependency Grammar emphasize the point that Dependency Grammar is much simpler than phrase structure grammars, since there are fewer nodes and the general concept is more easy to grasp (see for instance Osborne 2014: Section 3.2, Section 7). This is indeed true: Dependency Grammar is well-suited for teaching grammar in introductory classes. However, as Sternefeld & Richter (2012: 285) point out in a rather general discussion, simple syntax has the price of complex semantics and vice versa. So, in addition to the dependency structure that is described in Dependency Syntax, one needs other levels. One level is the level of semantics and another one is linearization. As far as linearization is concerned, Dependency Grammar has two options: assuming continuous constituents, that is, projective structures, or allowing for discontinuous constituents. These options will be discussed in the following subsections. Section 11.7.2 compares dependency grammars with phrase structure grammars and shows that projective Dependency Grammars can be translated into phrase structure grammars. It also shows that non-projective structures can be modeled in theories like HPSG. The integration of semantics is discussed in Section <IP_ADDRESS> and it will become clear that once other levels are taken into account, Dependency Grammars are not necessarily simpler than phrase structure grammars.

## **11.7.1 Linearization**

We have seen several approaches to linearization in this chapter. Many just assume a dependency graph and some linearization according to the topological fields model. As has been argued in Section 11.5, allowing discontinuous serialization of a head and its dependents opens up Pandora's box. I have discussed the analysis of nonlocal dependencies by Kunze (1968), Hudson (1997, 2000), Kahane, Nasr & Rambow (1998), and Groß & Osborne (2009). With the exception of Hudson those authors assume that dependents of a head rise to a dominating head only in those cases in which a discontinuity would arise otherwise. However, there seems to be a reason to assume that fronting should be

treated by special mechanisms even in cases that allow for continuous serialization. For instance, the ambiguity or lack of ambiguity of the examples in (19) cannot be explained in a straightforward way:20

	- b. dass that er he das the Buch book nicht not oft often liest reads 'It is not the case that he reads the book often.'
	- c. dass that er he das the Buch book oft often nicht not liest reads 'It is often that he does not read the book.'

The point about the three examples is that only (19a) is ambiguous. Even though (19c) has the same order as far as *oft* 'often' and *nicht* 'not' are concerned, the sentence is not ambiguous. So it is the fronting of an adjunct that is the reason for the ambiguity. The dependency graph for (19a) is shown in Figure 11.27. Of course the dependencies

Figure 11.27: Dependency graph for *Oft liest er das Buch nicht.* 'He does not read the book often.'

for (19b) and (19c) do not differ. The graphs would be the same, only differing in serialization. Therefore, differences in scope could not be derived from the dependencies and complicated statements like (20) would be necessary:

(20) If a dependent is linearized in the *Vorfeld* it can both scope over and under all other adjuncts of the head it is a dependent of.

Eroms (1985: 320) proposes an analysis of negation in which the negation is treated as the head; that is, the sentence in (21) has the structure in Figure 11.28.21

20See Lötscher (1985: 208–209) for a discussion of similar examples making the same point.

21But see Eroms (2000: Section 11.2.3).

#### 11 Dependency Grammar

Figure 11.28: Analysis of negation according to Eroms (1985: 320)

(21) Er he kommt comes nicht. not 'He does not come.'

This analysis is equivalent to analyses in the Minimalist Program assuming a NegP and it has the same problem: the category of the whole object is Adv, but it should be V. This is a problem since higher predicates may select for a V rather than an Adv.22

The same is true for constituent negation or other scope bearing elements. For example, the analysis of (22) would have to be the one in Figure 11.29.

(22) der the angebliche alleged Mörder murderer

Figure 11.29: Analysis that would result if one considered all scope-bearing adjuncts to be heads

This structure would have the additional problem of being non-projective. Eroms does treat the determiner differently from what is assumed here, so this type of non-projectiv-

22See for instance the analysis of embedded sentences like (23) below.

ity may not be a problem for him. However, the head analysis of negation would result in non-projectivity in so-called coherent constructions in German. The sentence in (23) has two readings: in the first reading, the negation scopes over *singen* 'sing' and in the second one over *singen darf* 'sing may'.

(23) dass that er he nicht not singen sing darf may 'that he is not allowed to sing' or 'that he is allowed not to sing'

The reading in which *nicht* 'not' scopes over the whole verbal complex would result in the non-projective structure that is given in Figure 11.30. Eroms also considers an

Figure 11.30: Analysis that results if one assumes the negation to be a head

analysis in which the negation is a word part ('Wortteiläquivalent'). This does, however, not help here since first the negation and the verb are not adjacent in V2 contexts like (19a) and even in verb-final contexts like (23). Eroms would have to assume that the object to which the negation attaches is the whole verbal complex *singen darf* 'sing may', that is, a complex object consisting of two words.

This leaves us with the analysis provided in Figure 11.27 and hence with a problem since we have one structure with two possible adjunct realizations that correspond to different readings. This is not predicted by an analysis that treats the two possible linearizations simply as alternative orderings.

Thomas Groß (p. c. 2013) suggested an analysis in which *oft* does not depend on the verb but on the negation. This corresponds to constituent negation in phrase structure approaches. The dependency graph is shown on the left-hand side in Figure 11.31. The figure on the right-hand side shows the graph for the corresponding verb-final sentence. The reading corresponding to constituent negation can be illustrated with contrastive expressions. While in (24a) it is only *oft* 'often' which is negated, it is *oft gelesen* 'often read' that is in the scope of negation in (24b).

Figure 11.31: Dependency graph for *Oft liest er das Buch nicht.* 'He does not read the book often.' according to Groß and verb-final variant

Figure 11.32: Possible syntactic analyses for *er das Buch nicht oft liest* 'he does not read the book often'

	- b. Er he hat has das the Buch book nicht not oft often gelesen, read sondern but selten seldom gekauft. bought 'He did not read the book often but rather bought it seldom.'

These two readings correspond to the two phrase structure trees in Figure 11.32. Note that in an HPSG analysis, the adverb *oft* would be the head of the phrase *nicht oft* 'not often'. This is different from the Dependency Grammar analysis suggested by Groß.

Figure 11.33: Dependency graph for *Dem Saft eine kräftige Farbe geben Blutorangen.* 'Blood oranges give the juice a strong color.'

Furthermore, the Dependency Grammar analysis has two structures: a flat one with all adverbs depending on the same verb and one in which *oft* depends on the negation. The phrase structure-based analysis has three structures: one with the order *oft* before *nicht*, one with the order *nicht* before *oft* and the one with direct combination of *nicht* and *oft*. The point about the example in (19a) is that one of the first two structures is missing in the Dependency Grammar representations. This probably does not make it impossible to derive the semantics, but it is more difficult than it is in constituent-based approaches.

Furthermore, note that models that directly relate dependency graphs to topological fields will not be able to account for sentences like (25).

(25) Dem the Saft juice eine a kräftige strong Farbe color geben give Blutorangen.23 blood.oranges 'Blood oranges give a strong color to the juice.'

The dependency graph of this sentence is given in Figure 11.33.

Such apparent multiple frontings are not restricted to NPs. Various types of dependents can be placed in the *Vorfeld*. An extensive discussion of the data is provided in Müller (2003a). Additional data have been collected in a research project on multiple frontings and information structure (Bildhauer 2011). Any theory based on dependencies alone and not allowing for empty elements is forced to give up the restriction commonly assumed in the analysis of V2 languages, namely that the verb is in second position. In comparison, analyses like GB and those HPSG variants that assume an empty verbal head can assume that a projection of such a verbal head occupies the *Vorfeld*. This explains why the material in the *Vorfeld* behaves like a verbal projection containing a visible verb: such *Vorfelds* are internally structured topologically. They may have a filled *Nachfeld* and even a particle that fills the right sentence bracket. See Müller (2005c, 2023a) for further data, discussion, and a detailed analysis. The equivalent of the analysis in

23Bildhauer & Cook (2010) found this example in the *Deutsches Referenzkorpus* (DeReKo), hosted at Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim: http://www.ids-mannheim.de/kl/projekte/korpora, 2018-02-20.

#### 11 Dependency Grammar

Figure 11.34: Dependency graph for *Dem Saft eine kräftige Farbe geben Blutorangen.* 'Blood oranges give the juice a strong color.' with an empty verbal head for the *Vorfeld*

Gross & Osborne's framework (2009) would be something like the graph that is shown in Figure 11.34, but note that Groß & Osborne (2009: 73) explicitly reject empty elements, and in any case an empty element which is stipulated just to get the multiple fronting cases right would be entirely ad hoc.24 It is important to note that the issue is not solved by simply dropping the V2 constraint and allowing dependents of the finite verb to be realized to its left, since the fronted constituents do not necessarily depend on the finite verb as the examples in (26) show:

	- b. [Kurz] briefly [die the Bestzeit] best.time hatte had der the Berliner Berliner Andreas Andreas Klöden Klöden […] gehalten.26 held 'Andreas Klöden from Berlin had briefly held the record time.'

And although the respective structures are marked, such multiple frontings can even cross clause boundaries:

24I stipulated such an empty element in a linearization-based variant of HPSG allowing for discontinuous constituents (Müller 2002b), but later modified this analysis so that only continuous constituents are allowed, verb position is treated as head-movement and multiple frontings involve the same empty verbal head as is used in the verb movement analysis (Müller 2005c, 2023a).

25taz, 07.07.1999, p. 18. Quoted from Müller (2002b).

26Märkische Oderzeitung, 28./29.07.2001, p. 28.

(27) Der the.dat Maria Maria einen a.acc Ring ring glaube believe ich I nicht, not daß that er he je ever schenken give wird.27 will 'I don't think that he would ever give Maria a ring.'

If such dependencies are permitted it is really difficult to constrain them. The details cannot be discussed here, but the reader is referred to Müller (2005c, 2023a).

Note also that Engel's statement regarding the linear order in German sentences (2014: 50) referring to one element in front of the finite verb (see footnote 7) is very imprecise. One can only guess what is intended by the word *element*. One interpretation is that it is a continuous constituent in the classical sense of constituency-based grammars. An alternative would be that there is a continuous realization of a head and some but not necessarily all of its dependents. This alternative would allow an analysis of extraposition with discontinuous constituents of (28) as it is depicted in Figure 11.35.

 München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994, p. 201, translation by Hans Hermann.

A formalization of such an analysis is not trivial, since one has to be precise about what exactly can be realized discontinuously and which parts of a dependency must be realized continuously. Kathol & Pollard (1995) developed such an analysis of extraposition in the framework of HPSG. See also Müller (1999b: Section 13.3). I discuss the basic mechanisms for such linearization analyses in HPSG in the following section.

# **11.7.2 Dependency Grammar vs. phrase structure grammar**

This section deals with the relation between Dependency Grammars and phrase structure grammars. I first show that projective Dependency Grammars can be translated into phrase structure grammars (Section <IP_ADDRESS>). I will then deal with non-projective DGs and show how they can be captured in linearization-based HPSG (Section <IP_ADDRESS>). Section <IP_ADDRESS> argues for the additional nodes that are assumed in phrase structurebased theories and Section <IP_ADDRESS> discusses headless constructions, which pose a problem for all Dependency Grammar accounts.

## **<IP_ADDRESS> Translating projective Dependency Grammars into phrase structure grammars**

As noted by Gaifman (1965), Covington (1990: 234), Oliva (2003) and Hellwig (2006: 1093), certain projective headed phrase structure grammars can be turned into Dependency Grammars by moving the head one level up to replace the dominating node. So in an NP structure, the N is shifted into the position of the NP and all other connections remain the same. Figure 11.36 illustrates. Of course this procedure cannot be applied to all phrase

Figure 11.36: *a book* in a phrase structure and a Dependency Grammar analysis

structure grammars directly since some involve more elaborate structure. For instance, the rule S → NP, VP cannot be translated into a dependency rule, since NP and VP are both complex categories.

In what follows, I want to show how the dependency graph in Figure 11.1 can be recast as headed phrase structure rules that license a similar tree, namely the one in Figure 11.37. I did not use the labels NP and VP to keep the two figures maximally similar. The P part of NP and VP refers to the saturation of a projection and is often ignored in figures. See Chapter 9 on HPSG, for example. The grammar that licenses the tree is given in (29), again ignoring valence information.

Figure 11.37: Analysis of *The child reads a book.* in a phrase structure with flat rules

If one replaces the N and V in the right-hand side of the two left-most rules in (29) with the respective lexical items and then removes the rules that license the words, one arrives at the lexicalized variant of the grammar given in (30):

*Lexicalized* means that every partial tree licensed by a grammar rule contains a lexical element. The grammar in (30) licenses exactly the tree in Figure 11.1.29

One important difference between classical phrase structure grammars and Dependency Grammars is that the phrase structure rules impose a certain order on the daughters. That is, the V rule in (30) implies that the first nominal projection, the verb, and the second nominal projection have to appear in the order stated in the rule. Of course this ordering constraint can be relaxed as it is done in GPSG. This would basically permit any order of the daughters at the right hand side of rules. This leaves us with the integration of adjuncts. Since adjuncts depend on the head as well (see Figure 11.4), a rule could be assumed that allows arbitrarily many adjuncts in addition to the arguments. So the V rule in (30) would be changed to the one in (31):30

(i) X[Y1, Y2, ~, Y3]

29As mentioned on page 373, Gaifman (1965: 305), Hays (1964: 513), Baumgärtner (1970: 57) and Heringer (1996: 37) suggest a general rule format for dependency rules that has a special marker ('\*' and '~', respectively) in place of the lexical words in (30). Heringer's rules have the form in (31):

X is the category of the head, Y1, Y2, and Y3 are dependents of the head and '~' is the position into which the head is inserted.

30See page 192 for a similar rule in GPSG and see Kasper (1994) for an HPSG analysis of German that assumes entirely flat structures and integrates an arbitrary number of adjuncts. Dahl (1980) argues that one needs "higher nodes" (N nodes and VP nodes in other terminology) for adjunct attachment for semantic reasons. I think this is not correct since – as Kasper showed – relational constraints could be used to determine complex semantic representations. I agree though that assuming these nodes makes things a lot easier. See also footnote 37.

#### 11 Dependency Grammar

(31) V → N reads N Adv\*

Such generalized phrase structures would give us the equivalent of projective Dependency Grammars.31 However, as we have seen, some researchers allow for crossing edges, that is, for discontinuous constituents. In what follows, I show how such Dependency Grammars can be formalized in HPSG.

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Non-projective Dependency Grammars and phrase structure grammars with discontinuous constituents**

The equivalent to non-projective dependency graphs are discontinuous constituents in phrase structure grammars. In what follows I want to provide one example of a phrase structure-based theory that permits discontinuous structures. Since, as I will show, discontinuities can be modeled as well, the difference between phrase structure grammars and Dependency Grammars boils down to the question of whether units of words are given a label (for instance NP) or not.

The technique that is used to model discontinuous constituents in frameworks like HPSG goes back to Mike Reape's work on German (1991, 1992, 1994). Reape uses a list called domain to represent the daughters of a sign in the order in which they appear at the surface of an utterance. (32) shows an example in which the dom value of a headedphrase is computed from the dom value of the head and the list of non-head daughters.

$$\begin{aligned} \text{(32)} \quad &\quad \textit{headed-phase} \Rightarrow \begin{bmatrix} \textit{HEAD-DTR} \boxed{\begin{array}{c} \Box\\ \text{NON-HEAD-DTRS} \end{array}} \\ \textit{DOM} \end{bmatrix} \end{aligned} $$

The symbol '⃝' stands for the *shuffle* relation. *shuffle* relates three lists A, B and C iff C contains all elements from A and B and the order of the elements in A and the order of the elements of B is preserved in C. (33) shows the combination of two sets with two elements each:

(33) ⟨ *a, b* ⟩ ⃝ ⟨ *c, d* ⟩ = ⟨ *a, b, c, d* ⟩ ∨ ⟨ *a, c, b, d* ⟩ ∨ ⟨ *a, c, d, b* ⟩ ∨ ⟨ *c, a, b, d* ⟩ ∨ ⟨ *c, a, d, b* ⟩ ∨ ⟨ *c, d, a, b* ⟩

The result is a disjunction of six lists. *a* is ordered before *b* and *c* before *d* in all of these lists, since this is also the case in the two lists ⟨ *a, b* ⟩ and ⟨ *c, d* ⟩ that have been

31Sylvain Kahane (p. c. 2015) states that binarity is important for Dependency Grammars, since there is one rule for the subject, one for the object and so on (as for instance in Kahane 2009, which is an implementation of Dependency Grammar in the HPSG formalism). However, I do not see any reason to disallow for flat structures. For instance, Ginzburg & Sag (2000: 364) assumed a flat rule for subject auxiliary inversion in HPSG. In such a flat rule the specifier/subject and the other complements are combined with the verb in one go. This would also work for more than two valence features that correspond to grammatical functions like subject, direct object, indirect object. See also footnote 29 on flat rules.

combined. But apart from this, *b* can be placed before, between or after *c* and *d*. Every word comes with a domain value that is a list that contains the word itself:

(34) Domain contribution of single words, here *gibt* 'gives':

$$
\begin{bmatrix}
\mathsf{PHON} & \left< \begin{matrix} \mathsf{gibt} \end{matrix} \right> \\
\begin{matrix} \mathsf{sYNSEM} & \dots \\ \mathsf{DOM} & \left< \begin{matrix} \Pi \end{matrix} \right> \end{matrix}
\end{bmatrix}
$$

The description in (34) may seem strange at first glance, since it is cyclic, but it can be understood as a statement saying that *gibt* contributes itself to the items that occur in linearization domains.

The constraint in (35) is responsible for the determination of the phon values of phrases:

$$\begin{array}{l} \text{(35)} \quad \textit{phras} \Longrightarrow \begin{bmatrix} \textsf{PHON} & \box{\textsf{L}} \oplus \dots \oplus \textsf{[}\box{\textsf{m}}\\\\ \textsf{DOM} & \left\langle \begin{bmatrix} \textsf{sign}\\ \textsf{PHON} & \box{\textsf{L}} \end{bmatrix}, \dots, \begin{bmatrix} \textsf{sign}\\ \textsf{PHON} & \box{\textsf{m}} \end{bmatrix} \end{array} \right\rangle \end{array}$$

It states that the phon value of a sign is the concatenation of the phon values of its domain elements. Since the order of the domain elements corresponds to their surface order, this is the obvious way to determine the phon value of the whole linguistic object.

Figure 11.38 shows how this machinery can be used to license binary branching structures with discontinuous constituents. Words or word sequences that are separated by commas stand for separate domain objects, that is, ⟨ *das, Buch* ⟩ contains the two objects *das* and *Buch* and ⟨ *das Buch, gibt* ⟩ contains the two objects *das Buch* and *gibt*. The important point to note here is that the arguments are combined with the head in the order

V[dom ⟨ *der Frau, ein Mann, das Buch, gibt* ⟩]

Figure 11.38: Analysis of *dass der Frau ein Mann das Buch gibt* 'that a man gives the woman the book' with binary branching structures and discontinuous constituents

Figure 11.39: Analysis of *dass der Frau ein Mann das Buch gibt* 'that a man gives the woman the book' with binary branching structures and discontinuous constituents showing the discontinuity

accusative, dative, nominative, although the elements in the constituent order domain are realized in the order dative, nominative, accusative rather than nominative, dative, accusative, as one would expect. This is possible since the formulation of the computation of the dom value using the shuffle operator allows for discontinuous constituents. The node for *der Frau das Buch gibt* 'the woman the book gives' is discontinuous: *ein Mann* 'a man' is inserted into the domain between *der Frau* 'the woman' and *das Buch* 'the book'. This is more obvious in Figure 11.39, which has a serialization of NPs that corresponds to their order.

Such binary branching structures were assumed for the analysis of German by Kathol (1995, 2000) and Müller (1995, 1996c, 1999b, 2002a), but as we have seen throughout this chapter, Dependency Grammar assumes flat representations (but see Footnote 31 on page 404). Schema 1 licenses structures in which all arguments of a head are realized in one go.32

### **Schema 1 (Head-Complement Schema (flat structure))**

```
head-complement-phrase ⇒

 synsem|loc|cat|comps ⟨⟩
 head-dtr|synsem|loc|cat|comps 1
 non-head-dtrs 1
```
To keep the presentation simple, I assume that the comps list contains descriptions of complete signs. Therefore the whole list can be identified with the list of non-head

32I assume here that all arguments are contained in the comps list of a lexical head, but nothing hinges on that. One could also assume several valence features and nevertheless get a flat structure. For instance, Borsley (1989: 339) suggests a schema for auxiliary inversion in English and verb-initial sentences in Welsh that refers to both the valence feature for subjects and for complements and realizes all elements in a flat structure.

daughters.33 The computation of the dom value can be constrained in the following way:

$$\text{(36)}\quad head \text{-}phase \Rightarrow \begin{bmatrix} \text{HEAD-DTR} & \boxed{\Box} \\ \text{NON-HEAD-DTR} & \left\{ \boxed{\Box}, \dots, \boxed{\Box} \right\} \\ \text{DM} & \left\{ \boxed{\Box} \right\} \bigcirc \left\{ \boxed{\Box} \right\} \bigcirc \dots \bigcirc \left\{ \boxed{\Box} \right\} \end{bmatrix}$$

This constraint says that the value of dom is a list which is the result of shuffling singleton lists each containing one daughter as elements. The result of such a shuffle operation is a disjunction of all possible permutations of the daughters. This seems to be overkill for something that GPSG already gained by abstracting away from the order of the elements on the right hand side of a phrase structure rule. Note, however, that this machinery can be used to reach even freer orders: by referring to the dom values of the daughters rather than the daughters themselves, it is possible to insert individual words into the dom list.

$$\begin{array}{ll} \text{(37)} & \text{headed-phase} \Rightarrow \begin{bmatrix} \text{HEAD-DTR} \left[ \text{nom} \quad \boxed{\Box} \\ \text{NON-HEAD-DTR} \left< \left\{ \begin{array}{c} \text{nom} \left[ \boxed{\Box} \right] \dots \left[ \begin{array}{c} \text{nom} \left[ \boxed{\Box} \end{array} \right] \end{array} \right\} \right. \\ \text{[DOM} & \left\{ \left[ \boxed{\Box} \right] \bigcirc \left\{ \left[ \boxed{\Box} \right] \right\} \bigcirc \dots \bigcirc \left\{ \left[ \boxed{\Box} \right] \right\} \end{array} \end{array}$$

Using this constraint we have dom values that basically contain all the words in an utterance in any permutation. What we are left with is a pure Dependency Grammar without any constraints on projectivity. With such a grammar we could analyze the non-projecting structure of Figure 11.6 on page 376 and much more. The analysis in terms of domain union is shown in Figure 11.40. It is clear that such discontinuity is

Figure 11.40: Unwanted analysis of *dass die Frauen Türen öffnen* 'that the women open doors' using Reape-style constituent order domains

unwanted and hence one has to have restrictions that enforce continuity. One possible restriction is to require projectivity and hence equivalence to phrase structure grammars in the sense that was discussed above.

33Without this assumption one would need a relational constraint that maps a list with descriptions of type *synsem* onto a list with descriptions of type *sign*. See Meurers (1999c: 198) for details.

#### 11 Dependency Grammar

There is some dispute going on about the question of whether constituency/dependency is primary/necessary to analyze natural language: while Hudson (1980) and Engel (1996) claim that dependency is sufficient, a claim that is shared by dependency grammarians (according to Engel 1996), Leiss (2003) claims that it is not. In order to settle the issue, let us take a look at some examples:

(38) Dass that Peter Peter kommt, comes klärt resolves nicht, not ob whether Klaus Klaus spielt. plays 'That Peter comes does not resolve the question of whether Klaus will play.'

If we know the meaning of the utterance, we can assign a dependency graph to it. Let us assume that the meaning of (38) is something like (39):

(39) ¬ *resolve*′ (*that*′ (*come*′ (*Peter*′ )),*whether*′ (*play*′ (*Klaus*′ )))

With this semantic information, we can of course construct a dependency graph for (38). The reason is that the dependency relation is reflected in a bi-unique way in the semantic representation in (39). The respective graph is given in Figure 11.41. But note that this

Figure 11.41: The dependency graph of *Dass Peter kommt, klärt nicht, ob Klaus spielt.* 'That Peter comes does not resolve the question of whether Klaus plays.' can be derived from the semantic representation.

does not hold in the general case. Take for instance the example in (40):

(40) Dass that Peter Peter kommt, comes klärt resolves nicht, not ob whether Klaus Klaus kommt. comes 'That Peter comes does not resolve the question of whether Klaus comes.'

Here the word *kommt* appears twice. Without any notion of constituency or restrictions regarding adjacency, linear order and continuity, we cannot assign a dependency graph unambiguously. For instance, the graph in Figure 11.42 is perfectly compatible with the meaning of this sentence: *dass* dominates *kommt* and *kommt* dominates *Peter*, while *ob* dominates *kommt* and *kommt* dominates *Klaus*. I used the wrong *kommt* in the depen-

dency chains, but this is an issue of linearization and is independent of dependency. As soon as one takes linearization information into account, the dependency graph in Figure 11.42 is ruled out since *ob* 'whether' does not precede its verbal dependent *kommt* 'comes'. But this explanation does not work for the example in Figure 11.6. Here, all dependents are linearized correctly; it is just the discontinuity of *die* and *Türen* that is inappropriate. If it is required that *die* and *Türen* are continuous, we have basically let constituents back in (see Footnote 9 on page 376).

Similarly, non-projective analyses without any constraints regarding continuity would permit the word salad in (41b):

b. \* Deshalb therefore klärt resolves dass that ob whether Peter Peter Klaus Klaus kommt comes spielt. plays

(41b) is a variant of (41a) in which the elements of the two clausal arguments are in correct order with respect to each other, but both clauses are discontinuous in such a way that the elements of each clause alternate. The dependency graph is shown in Figure 11.43. As was explained in Section <IP_ADDRESS> on the analysis of nonlocal dependencies in Fluid Construction Grammar, a grammar of languages like English and German has to constrain the clauses in such a way that they are continuous with the exception of extractions to the left. A similar statement can be found in Hudson (1980: 192). Hudson also states that an item can be fronted in English, provided all of its dependents

Figure 11.43: The dependency graph of the word salad *Deshalb klärt dass ob Peter Klaus kommt spielt.* 'Therefore resolves that whether Peter Klaus comes plays' which is admitted by non-projective Dependency Grammars that do not restrict discontinuity

are fronted with it (p. 184). This "item with all its dependents" is the constituent in constituent-based grammars. The difference is that this object is not given an explicit name and is not assumed to be a separate entity containing the head and its dependents in most Dependency Grammars.34

Summing up what has been covered in this section so far, I have shown what a phrase structure grammar that corresponds to a certain Dependency Grammar looks like. I have also shown how discontinuous constituents can be allowed for. However, there are issues that remained unaddressed so far: not all properties that a certain phrase has are identical to its lexical head and the differences have to be represented somewhere. I will discuss this in the following subsection.

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Features that are not identical between heads and projections**

As Oliva (2003) points out, the equivalence of Dependency Grammar and HPSG only holds up as far as head values are concerned. That is, the node labels in dependency graphs correspond to the head values in an HPSG. There are, however, additional features like cont for the semantics and slash for nonlocal dependencies. These values usually differ between a lexical head and its phrasal projections. For illustration, let us have a look at the phrase *a book*. The semantics of the lexical material and the complete phrase is given in (42):35

34See however Hellwig (2003) for an explicit proposal that assumes that there is a linguistic object that represents the whole constituent rather than just the lexical head.

35For lambda expressions see Section 2.3.

(42) a. *a*: ∃ ( () ∧ ()) b. *book*: (*book*′ ()) c. *a book*: ∃ (*book*′ () ∧ ())

Now, the problem for the Dependency Grammar notation is that there is no NP node that could be associated with the semantics of *a book* (see Figure 11.36 on page 402), the only thing present in the tree is a node for the lexical N: the node for *book*. 36 This is not a big problem, however: the lexical properties can be represented as part of the highest node as the value of a separate feature. The N node in a dependency graph would then have a cont value that corresponds to the semantic contribution of the complete phrase and a lex-cont value that corresponds to the contribution of the lexical head of the phrase. So for *a book* we would get the following representation:

$$\begin{array}{ll} \text{(43)} & \begin{bmatrix} \text{conv} & \lambda Q \exists \mathbf{x} (book'(\mathbf{x}) \land Q(\mathbf{x})) \\ \text{LEXICAL-conv} & \lambda y \ (book'(y)) \end{bmatrix} \end{array}$$

With this kind of representation one could maintain analyses in which the semantic contribution of a head together with its dependents is a function of the semantic contribution of the parts.

Now, there are probably further features in which lexical heads differ from their projections. One such feature would be slash, which is used for nonlocal dependencies in HPSG and could be used to establish the relation between the risen element and the head in an approach à la Groß & Osborne (2009). Of course we can apply the same trick again. We would then have a feature lexical-slash. But this could be improved and the features of the lexical item could be grouped under one path. The general skeleton would then be (44):

$$\begin{aligned} \text{(44)} \quad & \begin{bmatrix} \text{conv} \\ \text{SLASH} \\ \text{LEXICAL} \\ \text{LEXICAL} \end{bmatrix} \begin{bmatrix} \text{conv} \\ \text{SLASH} \end{bmatrix} \end{aligned} $$

But if we rename lexical to head-dtr, we basically get the HPSG representation.

Hellwig (2003: 602) states that his special version of Dependency Grammar, which he calls Dependency Unification Grammar, assumes that governing heads select complete nodes with all their daughters. These nodes may differ in their properties from their head (p. 604). They are in fact constituents. So this very explicit and formalized variant of Dependency Grammar is very close to HPSG, as Hellwig states himself (p. 603).

36Hudson (2003: 391–392) is explicit about this: "In dependency analysis, the dependents modify the head word's meaning, so the latter carries the meaning of the whole phrase. For example, in *long books about linguistics*, the word *books* means 'long books about linguistics' thanks to the modifying effect of the dependents." For a concrete implementation of this idea see Figure 11.44.

An alternative is to assume different representational levels as in Meaning–Text Theory (Mel'čuk 1981). In fact the cont value in HPSG is also a different representational level. However, this representational level is in sync with the other structure that is built.

#### 11 Dependency Grammar

Hudson's Word Grammar (2018) is also explicitly worked out and, as will be shown, it is rather similar to HPSG. The representation in Figure 11.44 is a detailed description of what the abbreviated version in Figure 11.45 stands for. What is shown in the first-

Figure 11.44: Analysis of *Small children were playing outside.* according to Hudson (2018: 105)

Figure 11.45: Abbreviated analysis of *Small children were playing outside.* according to Hudson (2018: 105)

diagram is that a combination of two nodes results in a new node.37 For instance, the combination of *playing* and *outside* yields *playing*′ , the combination of *small* and *children* yields *children*′ , and the combination of *children*′ and *playing*′ yields *playing*′′. The combination of *were* and *playing*′′ results in *were*′ and the combination of *children*′′ and *were*′ yields *were*′′. The only thing left to explain is why there is a node for *children* that is not the result of the combination of two nodes, namely *children*′′. The line with the triangle at the bottom stands for default inheritance. That is, the upper node inherits all properties from the lower node by default. Defaults can be overridden, that is, information at the upper node may differ from information at the dominated node. This makes it possible to handle semantics compositionally: nodes that are the result of the combination of two nodes have a semantics that is the combination of the meaning of the two combined nodes. Turning to *children* again, *children*′ has the property that it must be adjacent to *playing*, but since the structure is a raising structure in which *children* is raised to the subject of *were*, this property is overwritten in a new instance of *children*, namely *children*′′ .

37By assuming these additional nodes Hudson addresses earlier criticism by Dahl (1980), who pointed out that *ordinary* in *ordinary French house* does not refer to *house* but to *French house*. So there has to be a representation for *French house* somewhere. At least at the semantic level. Hudson's additional nodes and classical N nodes solve this problem as well.

The interesting point now is that we get almost a normal phrase structure tree if we replace the words in the diagram in Figure 11.44 by syntactic categories. The result of the replacement is shown in Figure 11.46. The only thing unusual in this graph (marked

Figure 11.46: Analysis of *Small children are playing outside.* with category symbols

by dashed lines) is that N′ is combined with V[*ing*] ′ and the mother of N′ , namely N′′ , is combined with V[*fin*] ′ . As explained above, this is due to the analysis of raising in Word Grammar, which involves multiple dependencies between a raised item and its heads. There are two N nodes (N′ and N′′) in Figure 11.46 and two instances of *children* in Figure 11.44. Apart from this, the structure corresponds to what an HPSG grammar would license. The nodes in Hudson's diagram which are connected with lines with triangles at the bottom are related to their children using default inheritance. This too is rather similar to those versions of HPSG that use default inheritance. For instance, Ginzburg & Sag (2000: 33) use a Generalized Head Feature Principle that projects all properties of the head daughter to the mother by default.

The conclusion of this section is that the only principled difference between phrase structure grammars and Dependency Grammar is the question of how much intermediate structure is assumed: is there a VP without the subject? Are there intermediate nodes for adjunct attachment? It is difficult to decide these questions in the absence of fully worked out proposals that include semantic representations. Those proposals that are worked out – like Hudson's and Hellwig's – assume intermediate representations, which makes these approaches rather similar to phrase structure-based approaches. If one compares the structures of these fully worked out variants of Dependency Grammar with phrase structure grammars, it becomes clear that the claim that Dependency Grammars are simpler is unwarranted. This claim holds for compacted schematic representations like Figure 11.45 but it does not hold for fully worked out analyses.

The simplicity claim is repeatedly made in Timothy Osborne's work (for example in Osborne & Groß 2016: 132; Osborne 2018b: 2). In a reply to Osborne (2018b), I mentioned some of the phenomena discussed above and pointed out that they are not captured

#### 11 Dependency Grammar

by simple dependency structures (Müller 2019b) and argued that additional structure is needed in order to account for these phenomena. Somewhat ironically, Osborne (2018a) worked out analyses in his reply that introduced a new concept (the Colocant) and additional structure to capture semantic groupings. By doing so, he proved the point made above and in Müller (2019b).

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Non-headed constructions**

Hudson (1980: Section 4.E) discusses headless constructions like those in (45):

	- b. the biggest
	- c. the longer the stem
	- d. (with) his hat over his eyes