Subsumption vs. Unification

Stefan Mueller (Stefan.Mueller@dfki.de)
Thu, 17 Jul 1997 12:28:06 +0200

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Hi everybody,

In order to account for sentences like (1), Bob Ingria (1990) suggested
to test
constraints of the functor on the argument with a subsumption check.

(1) a. Die               da    stehen, kennen wir nicht.
       those [nom v acc] there stand   know   we  not   
       `We don't know those people who are standing there.'
   
    b. * Wer       da    steht, kennen wir nicht.
         who [nom] there stands know   we  not   

    c. Sie i"st, was              "ubrig bleibt.
       she eats  what [nom v acc] left   remain 
       `She eats what is left.'

In (1a) 'die' receives nominative case from 'stehen'. The whole relative
clause 'die da stehen' is an argument of the matrix verb and receives
accusative case from 'kennen'. Ingria accounted for the contrast of (1a)
and (1b) by assuming a compatibility test that checks the case values of
the argument against the value specified by the functor.

I wrote a paper about free relatives. 

@InProceedings{   Mueller:To-appear,
  author        = "Stefan M{\"u}ller",
  booktitle     = "Proceedings of Formal Grammar, Aix-en-Provence",
  title         = "An {HPSG}-Analysis for Free Relative Clauses in
{German}",
  url           = "http://www.dfki.de/~stefan/Pub/e_freeRel.html",
  year          = "To appear"
}

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