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Publication

Reconsidering the relations in constructions with non-verbal predicates

Tania Avgustinova; Hans Uszkoreit
In: Investigations into Formal Slavic Linguistics. Contributions of the Fourth European Conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages. Pages Part II: 483-498, Vol. Linguistik International: Band 10 (Part II), Peter Lang Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaft, 2003.

Abstract

A well-known challenge to any grammatical description is posed by predicative constructions in which there is no overt copular verb interpretable as a syntactic head. Empty categories used to be designed for one or several types of copula. In order to describe the constructions with non-verbal predication in a systematic way, we consider not only the linguistic entities that are involved, but also the syntagmatic relations holding between them. The HPSG formalisation sketched in this article allows for encoding the significant distinctions found across Slavic languages as well as for capturing the linguistic generalisations without postulating any empty categories.