• Language and Information
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.77-92
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• 2009

Geis (1973) has provided various properties of the subjects and by + Gerund Phrase (GerP) in English causative constructions. Among them, the two main issues of Geis's analysis are as follows: unlike Lakoff (1965; 1966), the subject of English causative constructions, including causative-inchoative verbs such as liquefy, first of all, should be acts or events, not persons, and the by + GerP in the construction is a complement of the causative verbs. In addition to these issues, Geis has provided various data exhibiting other idiosyncratic properties and proposed some transformational rules such as the Agent Creation Rule and rule orderings to explain them. Against Geis's claim, I propose that English causative verbs require either Proper nouns or GerP subjects and that the by + GerP in the constructions as a Verbal Modifier needs Gerunds, whose understood Affective-agent subject is identical to the subject of causative verbs with respect to the semantic index value. This enables us to solve the two main issues. At the same time, the other properties Geis mentioned also can be easily accounted for in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) by positing a few lexical constraints. On this basis, it is shown that given the few lexical constraints and existing grammatical tools in HPSG, the constraint-based analysis proposed here gives a simpler explanation of the properties of English causative constructions provided by Geis without transformational rules and rule orderings.

• Language and Information
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.73-91
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• 2004

The nominative and accusative postpositions in Korean may intervene between the negative auxiliary verb ANH and its complement verb phrase. As Korean is an OV language, this means that 'verb + {nom, acc} + ANH' as well as the simpler concatenation 'verb + ANH' is possible. This fact, together with an overwhelming regularity of these postpositions' optionality in virtually all constructions, poses a problem for formal approaches to the syntax of the language. Working in a constraint-based grammatical framework shaped by such works as Sag and Wasow (1999) and Copestake (2002), we put forth type hierarchies for major_class, which represents verb inflection, and for pos, which has two immediate subtypes, i.e., htrp_pos and ord_pos. What we call the 'half transparency' of the case postpositions separates them from all the other lexical items in the language. The type htrp_pos is used to constrain one of the two newly proposed head_comp_rules, where a newly proposed feature HEAD2 of a phrase inherits its value from the HEAD feature of the head word. The COMPS list of the negative auxiliary ANH is seen as containing a single phrase whose HEAD is a kind of nominal clause and whose HEAD2 is something that is one of the three maximal types: acc, nom, and null.