Sascha and Manfred attended the 5th General Meeting of the European network Parseme (Parsing and Multiword Expressions) in Iași, Romania.

Sascha presented a poster on “Syntactically Flexible VP-Idioms and the N-after-N Construction”. The poster is about how morphosyntactically flexible VP-idioms, like pull strings, and the so-called N-after-N construction, as in car after car, can combine to result in idiomatic VPs like pull string after string. Sascha is using a Semantic Representation approach in combination with Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) to account for such data.

Manfred had a poster on “Possessive alternations in German idioms”.  He argued that the various ways of expressing a possessor in German idioms follow from the interaction of two general mechanisms of German grammar ((i) many verbs allow for an additional dative complement that expresses an Affectee role and, (ii), definite NPs can be interpreted as being “possessed” by a co-argument).

The poster develops the ideas further that Manfred had presented earlier this year in Brussels.

Links:

• All posters presented at the meeting and the abstracts can be downloaded here.
• More pictures from the meeting