Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar: The handbook

Abstract

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a linguistic framework that models linguistic knowledge on all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) by using feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. This volume summarizes work that has been done since the mid 80s. Various chapters discus formal foundations and basic assumptions, describe the evolution of the framework and go into the details of various syntactic phenomena. Separate chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also handles related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and has a part in which HPSG is compared to other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar and Minimalim).