Chapter 12 At First Blush on Tenterhooks About Selectional Restrictions Imposed by

ABSTRACT. We will discuss German nouns which can only occur as the complements to a particular preposition. We will show that their distribution can best be accounted by generalizing HPSG’s selectional mechanisms so that any nonhead can in principle select the head with which it combines. Then, we will explore the ramifications of this proposal: we will account for data that have been discribed as collocational and argue that our account makes empirically correct predictions on possible collocational patterns. Selection is one of the major mechanisms in formal grammar such as HPSG (Pollard and Sag, 1994), and is used for two purposes which are usually applied in the same contexts: First, syntactic and semantic arguments are specified and their relation to the selector is indicated. This is usually expressed in terms of thematic rol