An HPSG-analysis for free relative clauses in German

At the moment there is no theory for free relatives in German in the HPSG framework (Pollard and Sag, 1994). From GB literature on the subject it is known that free relatives behave partly like noun phrases. They can fill argument positions of verbs. And although they are finite sentences, they are serialized like noun phrases in the German Mittelfeld. The function free relatives can take is not restricted to complements. Depending on the properties of the relative phrase, free relatives can be modifiers as well. I will argue that free relatives project to a category that is tightly related to the category of the relative phrase. The relation between the relative phrase and the projection of the free relative clause is established via a relational constraint. This accounts both for the syntactic regularities, and for the semantics of free relatives. As Ingria (1990) has shown, assignment of different case in the relative and the matrix clause poses problems for grammars that rely on unification alone. In the following paper I will argue against his subsumption based account, and provide a different solution to the problem that relies on the above mentioned relational constraints for the projection of properties of the relative phrase. In general there are three possibilities to describe the projections of free relatives: an empty head, a unary projection and a lexical rule. I will argue for the unary schema and discuss the alternatives. (orig.)Paper appeared in proceedings of formal grammar, Aix-en-Prevence (FR), 1997SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RR 5221(224)+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie, Bonn (Germany)DEGerman