this dissertation. I single out for special thanks first a few of the Ventura Hall crowd, including Mfirvet Eng, Nancy Wiegand, Susan Stucky (the other Mennonite formal linguist), and Kathie Carpenter, Suzanne Kemmer and Michael Barlow, with whom I have happily shared every step of the Stanford graduate pilgrimage. Next, I warmly thank Gina Wein for her competent administrative support and for her friendship. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the strong shaping influences of the members of the Stanford linguistics faculty, who teach and also model a vibrant and professional approach to linguistic research. Representative of these scholars are the three members of my reading committee, whose work and counsel have had a profound effect on my work; I thank Joan Bresnan, Ivan Sag, and my principal advisor, Thomas Wasow, whose patience, cheerful persistence, unstinting support, solid critique, creative ideas, and common sense made the writing of this thesis possible and enjoyable. Every student should have such an advisor

. This work belongs to a family of research efforts, called microtheories and aimed at describing the static meaning of all lexical categories in several languages in the framework of the MikroKosmos project on computational semantics. The latter also involves other static microtheories describing world knowledge and syntax-semantics mapping as well as dynamic microtheories connected with the actual process of text analysis. This paper describes our approach to determining and representing adjectival meaning, compares it with the body of knowledge on adjectives in literature and presents a detailed, practically tested methodology and heuristics for the acquisition of lexical entries for adjectives. The work was based on the set of over 6,000 English and about 1,500 Spanish adjectives obtained from task-oriented corpora. Introduction The topic of this paper is the information about adjectival meaning which should be included in a computational lexicon. Thus, we concentrate on...

There is a construction in English, exemplified by how long a bridge, which is so irregular that it has been named the Big Mess Construction, see Berman (1974). This paper first sketches its main characteristics (section 1) and a treatment of the internal structure of the noun phrase which serves as a background for the analysis (section 2). It then presents three ways in which the Big Mess Construction can be analysed; two of them are lexicalist and are shown to be implausible; the third is constructivist and is argued to be superior (section 3). In a next step, the discussion is extended to two other types of constructions. The first concerns the English adnominal reflexives, as in the children themselves, and is shown to require a constructivist analysis which is similar but not identical to the one for the Big Mess Construction (section 4). The second concerns the combination of such and what with the indefinite article, as in such a pleasure. In spite of its obvious resemblance with the Big Mess Construction this combination does not require a constructivist analysis; instead, it fits the lexicalist mould of most of the rest of HPSG

This paper proposes an analysis of adjectival constructions in HPSG, focussing on the behaviour of adjectives in NP, and develops an account of the familiar observation that adjectives without complements typically precede the noun, while those with complements or post-modifiers typically follow the noun. 1. INTRODUCTION Adjectives in English appear in a number of different contexts, including the following: (1) a. a tall person pre-nominal b. a person fond of children post-nominal c. a hard to pronounce name `complex As' d. a hard problem to solve `hard nuts' e. somebody interesting indefinite pronouns f. too good a chance to miss `big messes' (2) a. Sam is guilty. subject complement b. They consider Sam guilty. object complement/small-clause c. They hammered the metal flat. resultative d. Sam drinks beer cold. depictive e. Drunk, Sam came in, and fell over. free adjunct f. With Sam drunk, the problem was compounded. absolutive (1) are sometimes (misleadingly) called `attributive' us...

This paper analyzes the interrelation of two understudied phenomena of English: discontinuous modifier phenomenon (so willing to help out that they called early; more ready for what was coming than I was) and the complex pre-determination phenomenon (this delicious a lasagna; How hard a problem (was it)?). Despite their independence, they frequently occur intertwined, as in too heavy a trunk (for me) to lift and so lovely a melody that some people cried. This paper presents a declarative analysis of these and related facts that avoids syntactic movement in favor of monotonic constraint satisfaction. It demonstrates how an explicit, sign-based, constructional approach to grammatical structure captures linguistic generalizations, while at the same time accounting for idiosyncratic facts in this seemingly complex grammatical domain.

I Contributions to the Main Conference 5

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