A Formal Interpretation of Relations and Quantification in HPSG

Frank Richter, Manfred Sailer and Gerald Penn

In: Gosse Bouma, Erhard Hinrichs, Geert-Jan M. Kruijff, and Richard T. Oehrle (eds): Constraints and Resources in Natural Language Syntax and Semantics. CSLI Publications. pp. 281-298

The task of this paper is threefold:
First, by quoting examples from Pollard and Sag 1994 and others, we intend to bring to the reader's attention that an adequate formal language for HPSG grammars not only needs a means to express true relations and true negation, but also explicit quantification over components.
Second, we define a formal language, RSRL, that provides these means and has the linguistically desired kinds of models, namely exhaustive models.
Third, we prove that a discrepancy exists between the apparent intended use of feature-based languages in HPSG linguistics and computational considerations for languages underlying practical systems. We claim that, for HPSG, conceived of as a theory of language rather than as a theory of parsing, RSRL is the formal language which is by far the closest to the language implicitly used by HPSG linguists.

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Bibtex entry:

@incollection{Richter:Sailer:Penn:rsrl,
	author = {Frank Richter and Manfred Sailer and Gerald Penn},
	title = {{A Formal Interpretation of Relations and Quantification
		  in HPSG}},
	booktitle = {Constraints and Resources in Natural Language
	             Syntax and Semantics},
	editor = {Bouma, Gosse and Erhard Hinrichs and
	          Kruijff, Geert-Jan M. and Oehrle, Richard T.},
	year = {1999},
	pages = {281--298},
	publisher = {CSLI Publications}
}