Refining the semantics of lexical rules in HPSG

Abstract

This paper points out certain flaws in the semantics for lexical rule specifications developed in Meurers (2001). Under certain circumstances, certain words may not be licit inputs to a rule according to this semantics while one would expect them to be from inspecting the specification of the rule. The reasons for this are shown to be that whether properties of paths should be transferred from the input of a rule to its output is decided considering only the respective paths and their properties in isolation, ignoring the ‘non-local’ effects that transferring their properties can have. Furthermore, the semantics is insensitive to the possible shapes of inputs to the rule, which also makes it possible that inputs of certain shapes are unexpectedly not accepted. An alternative semantics is developed that does not suffer from these deficits.