A Perspective on PPs

Abstract

This paper investigates the treatment of the semantic contribution of prepositional phrases in HPSG, with particular reference to dative prepositional phrases (PPs). Using standard syntactic and semantic tests for argument structure, it is shown that certain for- and to-dative PPs must be construed as entities at a level between pure complements and pure adjuncts. A proposal is made for the semantic integration of PPs in an HPSG framework, based on work by Kasper (1993) and van Noord and Bouma (1994). The proposed approach accommodates various syntactic and semantic properties of adjuncts and provides a way of handling dative PPs which captures generalisations about their semantic contribution across verbal heads. 1 Introduction This paper investigates the treatment of the semantic contribution of prepositional phrases in HPSG, with particular reference to dative prepositional phrases (PPs). It begins with an investigation of the status of for - and to-dative PPs in Section 2 does th..