Empty-headed NPs in German and English
John Nerbonne (Alfa-Informatica, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
Tony Mullen (Alfa-Informatica, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
In this paper we argue that certain nominal phrase constructions
in German and English are best considered as having empty lexical
heads. We propose a feature LP, which gives the status of the
{\sc left periphery} of a nominal tree structure as one of three values,
{\it empty, full} or {\it one}. A number of simple
language-specific rules govern the combination of signs in terms of
their LP values. For example, determiners such as {\it none} or {\it
mine} are restricted to combining with common noun phrases (CNP)
whiose left perifery is empty [LP {\it empty}] while {\it no} and {\it
my} require [LP {\it full}]. The feature provides a simple
general explanation of a number of related phenomena wherein
determiners or adjectives of some description appear to ``carry the
weight'' of NPs, including a variety of German NP constructions,
certain possessive constructions in both English and German, and
generics. The broad descriptive power of this feature argues that it
is not an ad hoc solution. In order to justify it further, we
investigate alternate explanations for the same phenomena,
without using the LP feature, and argue that these approaches
introduce unnecessary ambiguity and other complications.