Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

We present an approach to the interpretation of non-sentential utterances like B’s utterance in the following mini-dialogue: A: “Who came to the party? ” B: “Peter. ” Such utterances pose several puzzles: they convey ‘sen-tence-type ’ messages (propositions, questions or request) while being of non-sentential form; and they are constrained both semantically and syntactically by the context. We address these puzzles in our approach which is composi-tional, since we provide a formal semantics for such fragments independent of their context, and constraint-based because resolution is based on collect-ing contextual constraints.