CONSTITUENT COORDINATION IN POLISH: AN ATTEMPT AT AN HPSG ACCOUNT

The aim of this paper is to provide an HPSG account of constituent
coordination in Polish.

Although coordinated structures are widespread in natural languages, their
formal analysis presents many problems.  First, in addition to coordination
of phrases of the same categories, non-homogeneous categories can be
conjoined, e.g., `(He is) a republican and proud of it'.  Second, conjoined
elements need not form constituents, e.g., `(He gave) Mary flowers and Sue a
record.'  Then, grammatical functions of conjuncts and conjunction, e.g.,
whether they are heads or not, are not clear.  Moreover, in languages with
a rich morphological system, such as Polish, agreement patterns in
coordinated structures present additional problems. In addition to
morphological features, agreement may depend on linear position, e.g.,
agreement of the coordinated NPs with the verb in Polish.

In this paper, we restrict ourselves only to constituent coordination.  For
these purposes, we adopt an HPSG analysis of constituent coordination based
on Paritong 1992.  Our analysis includes coordination of heterogeneous
categories but only in a limited way.  For example, we account for
coordination of adjunct phrases consisting of a PP and an ADJP or an NP,
as in:

Przyjdzie [jutro    albo w  poniedzialek].
come-FUT   tomorrow or   on Monday
`(S)he will come tomorrow or on Monday.'


As in Paritong 1992, we assume that conjunction is a functional (but not a
lexical) head of a coordinated phrase.  This reflects the intuition that
conjunctions contain almost no autonomous syntactic or semantic information
but they are operators.  In order to distinguish functional from lexical
heads, we introduce two attributes appropriate for the type head: MINOR and
MAJOR, cf. Netter 1994.  The former has the `functional' type as its value,
while the latter serves for lexical heads which are assigned the
`substantial' type values.  Such a specification of conjunction allows the
standard HPSG Head Feature Principle to operate also in coordinated
structures.  

A conjunction, as the head, requires (two) complements to form a phrase.
We assume that the syntactic structure of coordinated phrases is flat (all
complements are realised at once, in contrast to Paritong 1992).  This
allows us to adopt for coordination a general Immediate Dominance Schema of
HPSG, which combines a lexical item (the head of a phrase) with its
complements.  We require complements of the conjunction to have the same
(token-identical) subcategorization frames, but conjuncts need not be
saturated.  Thus, both coordination of phrases, e.g., VPs, and coordination
of words, e.g., verbs (which share arguments) is possible, as well as
`Right Node Raising'-kinds of effects.  If conjuncts are unsaturated,
unrealised arguments are `inherited' by the conjunction via the argument
composition mechanism a la Hinrichs and Nakazawa 1990.  

Unlike in Paritong 1992, we explicitly formulate conditions which establish
HEAD|MAJOR values of coordinated phrases.  Roughly, in case of coordination
of (homogeneous) arguments, the same category is assigned.  On the other
hand, coordination of (verbal) modifiers can be heterogeneous and is
treated as an adverbial phrase.  Also agreement patterns are obtained via
conditions imposed on specific types of coordinated phrases.  As in
Szpakowicz 1986, we account for coordination based on different types of
conjunctions, e.g., serial and discontinuous.  Unlike in Szpakowicz 1986,
we always provide a single lexical entry for all types of conjunctions.  In
our account, possible discontinuities are dealt with in phonology rather
than in syntax.  This allows us to provide a uniform analysis of these two
types of conjunctions.


REFERENCES:

Hinrichs and Nakazawa 1990:

@InProceedings{hin:nak:90,
  title =         "Subcategorization and {VP} Structure in {G}erman",
  author =        "Erhard Hinrichs and Tsuneko Nakazawa",
  booktitle =     "Proceedings of the Third Symposium on {G}ermanic
                  Linguistics",
  editor =        "Shaun Hughes and Joe Salmons",
  address =       "Amsterdam",
  publisher =     "Benjamins",
  year =          1990}


Netter 1994:

@InCollection{nett:94,
  author =       "Klaus Netter",
  title =        "Towards a Theory of Functional Heads",
  booktitle =    "German in {H}ead-{D}riven {P}hrase {S}tructure {G}rammar", 
  year =         1994,
  editor =       "John Nerbonne and Klaus Netter and Carl Pollard",
  number =       46,
  series =       "CSLI Lecture Notes",
  publisher =    "CSLI Publications",
  address =      "Stanford",
  pages =        "297--340"}


Paritong 1992:

@TechReport{pari:92,
  author =       "Maike Paritong",
  title =        "Constituent Coordination in {HPSG}",
  institution =  "Universit{\protect\"a}t des Saarlandes",
  year =         1992,
  number =       "CLAUS 24",
  address =      "Saarbr{\"u}cken"}


Szpakowicz 1986:

@Book{szpa:86,
  author =       "Stanis{\l}aw Szpakowicz",
  title =        "Formalny Opis Sk{\l}adniowy Zda{\'n} Polskich",
  publisher =    "Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego",
  year =         1986,
  address =      "Warszawa"}