In the Split NP construction, the descriptive material contributing information about one participant in a predicate's argument structure is realized discontinuously as two nominal phrases in different positions---in the sentence-inital topic position and within the Mittelfeld --, which is a challenge to syntactic accounts of argument selection and unbounded dependency constructions. Most approaches in the literature posit special mechanisms to deal with the construction, and/or fail to explain the parallel behaviour of the Mittelfeld NP and elliptical NPs. I propose an account in Lexical-Functional Grammar making use of standard concepts like unification at the level of functional structure to explain argument doubling (Andrews, 1990), and formalizing semantic composition in terms of linear logic (Dalrymple et al., 1997). The topic NP is explained to be a propertydenoting indefinite (Fanselow, 1988, p. 105), (van Geenhoven, 1996), the Mittelfeld NP is an elliptical NP, anaphorically linked to the topic. Linear logic allows to distinguish the contribution of the two NPs to the sentence meaning although their functional structures are unified, together filling a single argument slot. Through the consequent use of resource accounting in semantic construction, instantiated symbols as values of pred at the functional-syntactic level have been made redundant.

Introduction The split NP (or split topicalization) construction (henceforth SNP) of German has received much attention in the literature, as a challenge for syntactic accounts of argument selection and of unbounded dependency constructions (Bayer 1987; van Riemsdijk 1989; Fanselow 1988, 1993; Haider 1990; Hinrichs /Nakazawa 1994) and in the discussion of the semantic status of indefinites (Diesing 1992; van Geenhoven 1996). In this construction, the descriptive material about one underlying argument is not confined to a single NP as normal, but is split over two nominal constituents: (1) Bcher sieht Anna drei Books sees Anna three `As for books, Anna can see three.' 2 In terms of morphological marking of declension class (and similarly determiner selection), the two constituents behave like autonomous complete NPs (cf. (2a) vs. (2b)), i.e., the lower NP, appearing in the German Mittelfeld, has the same form a

We consider various analyses of certain asymmetries concerning morphosyntactic features in coordinate structures in Welsh in the light of the theories of agreement and of coordination in LFG. In classic LFG, a very simple view is taken of agreement phenomena such as person, number and gender agreement between nite verbs and their subjects, or gender and number agreement between determiners, adjectives and nominals and similar phenomena. Agreement is generally modelled by means of constraints stated over the grammatical features PER, NUM and GEN of the controller argument: since these features belong to the vocabulary of f-structure, agreement is viewed as a surface syntactic matter. It is well known that agreement with coordinate structures may require some computation of controller agreement features and (Dalrymple and Kaplan 1998) show how the LFG formalism may be extended to express such feature resolution principles, again treating agreement at f-structure. In this paper we focus ...

This paper investigates whether the fundamental linguistic insights and intuitions of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), which is usually presented as a "constraint-based" linguistic theory, can be reformulated in a "resource sensitive" framework using a substructural modal logic. In the approach investigated here, LFG's f-descriptions are replaced with expressions from a multi-modal propositional logic (with permutation and possibly limited contraction). In effect, the feature structure "unification" basis of LFG's f-structures is replaced with a very different resource based mechanism. It turns out that some linguistic analyses that required non-monotonic devices in LFG (such as the "constraint equations" in the Andrews (1982) analysis of Icelandic) can be straightforwardly expressed in the framework presented here. Moreover, a Curry-Howard correspondence between proofs in this logic and -terms provides a semantic interpretation as a by-product of the process of showing syntactic we...

We explore a set of morphosyntactic feature asymmetries in coordinate structures in Welsh in the light of the theories of agreement and coordination in LFG, and draw out some consequences for the theory of agreement in LFG. 1 In classic LFG, a very simple view is taken of agreement phenomena such as person, number and gender agreement between finite verbs and their subjects, NP-internal

We propose in this paper the use of two kinds of constraints in order to control the evaluation of ambiguous structures. The first ones concern the immediate context of the words. In case of ambiguity, these constraints form a network controlling an ambiguous area. The second kind of constraints relies on descriptions of the elementary trees that can be attached to the words. Such descriptions, called unary quasitrees, allow the representation of the dependency relations between the words. They form a proof net on which a filtering method can be applied in order to reduce the number of constraints. The elaboration of the constraint networks and its simplification rely on information available at the lexical level. So, the method presented here simplifies the control of the disambiguation without doing an actual parse and can be reused whatever the linguisitc formalism. 1 Introduction Before disambiguating a linguistic structure, an efficient parsing strategy should make use of various...