Lexical Licensing in Formal Grammar
Jan-Philipp Soehn · 2009
This paper discusses instances of restricted combinability of lexical items (words and multi-word units) with their contexts. Different subtypes of dis-tributional idiosyncrasies are presented, which occur on the phonological, morpho-syntactical, and semantic levels. Notably, external sandhi, cran-berry words, decomposable idioms and (idiosyncratic) polarity items are ad-dressed. These phenomena reveal an interesting interplay with regular lan-guage as well as between the different levels themselves. A detailed lexical-ist analysis is provided within a formal grammar framework, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. This approach motivates an architecture of gram-mar that includes a module to accommodate specific restrictions on the oc-currence environment of a lexical unit.