Glue Semantics for HPSG

Abstract

this paper outlines how it can be applied to HPSG. As well as providing an alternative form of semantics for HPSG, we believe that the benefits of HPSG glue include the following: (1) simplification of the Semantics Principle (Pollard and Sag, 1994); (2) a simple and elegant treatment of modifier scope, including empirical phenomena like quantifier scope ambiguity, the interaction of scope with raising, and recursive modification; (3) an analysis of control that handles agreement between controlled subjects and their coarguments while allowing for a property denotation for the controlled clause (Chierchia, 1984a,b); (4) re-use of highly efficient techniques for semantic derivation already implemented for LFG, and which target problems of ambiguity management also addressed by Minimal Recursion Semantics (Copestake et al., 1995, 1999). Glue semantics embodies a notion of `interpretation as deduction' closely related to categorial grammar's `parsing as deduction'. Syntactic analysis of a sentence yields a set of glue premises, which essentially state how bits of lexical meaning attach to words and phrases. Deduction in (linear) logic then combines the premises to derive a conclusion that attaches a meaning to the sentence as a whole. The innovation in this paper is to sketch how glue premises can be obtained from HPSG analyses; the subsequent stage of linear logic deduction is the same as when premises are obtained from LFG analyses. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly reviews the way in which linear logic / glue deduction assembles sentence meanings given a set of lexical glue premises. Section 3 describes the adjustments to HPSG's feature geometry necessary for it to construct sets of glue premises. Section 4 show how these adjustments give rise to sema..