HPSG

HPSG (Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar) 

Stanford and Berkeley espouse this syntactic theory.
It is a "highly lexicalized, non-derivational generative grammar theory."
It is a type of phrase structure grammar, as oppsed to a dependency grammar (The syntactic trees I learned are dependency grammars).

Morphology review, glossary

(less complex morphology                              more complex morphology)
(low morpheme-to-word ratio                           high morpheme-to-word ratio)

analytic / isolating > agglutinative / fusional > polysynthetic

• lexeme – a word concept.  A lexeme can represent multiple surface forms of a word that comprise the paradigm of the lexeme (e.g. run, runs, ran and running are the same lexeme, RUN).  As parts of a single concept, the forms of a lexeme will have the same syntactic category (runner is a different lexeme).
• lemma – a particular form of a lexeme conventionally chosen to represent the canonical form.  In a dictionary the lemma is the headword.
• paradigm - complete set of words associate with a given lexeme.
• inflectional rules – relate a lexeme to its forms.  Generally the syntactic category remains the same (e.g. eat and eaten, boy and boys)
• derivational rules – relate a lexeme to a new lexeme.  Generally, but not always, the syntactic category changes (e.g. slow and slowly).  Necessarily the meaning of the base changes (e.g. write and rewrite, circle and encircle).  Derivational affixes are bound morphemes.
• zero derivation or conversion – changing from one lexeme to another without any surface change (e.g. telephone and to telephone).

• endocentric compound – The compound has a head which represents the basic meaning (and same part-of-speech) of the whole (e.g. house and doghouse)
• exocentric compound – meaning of the compound is not transparent from the constituents (e.g. white-collar and must-have).
• copulative – …
• appositional – …

Review of common grammatical cases

 

“Among modern languages, cases still feature prominently in most of the Balto-Slavic languages, with most having six to eight cases, as well as German and Modern Greek, which have four.  In German, cases are mostly market on articles and adjectives, and less so on nouns.” (wikipedia)

1. nominative – subject of finite verb
2. accusative – direct object of verb
3. dative – indirect object of a verb
4. ablative – indicates movement from something or causality
5. genitive – possessive
6. vocative – addressee
7. locative – a location
8. instrumental – object use in performing an action

Ergative versus Accusative languages

 

In nominative-accusative languages (like English) the agent of a transitive verb and the solitary argument of an intransitive verb are treated alike.  They are both called the subject and they have a syntactic/morphological parity which might be word order or grammatical case (nominative).  The object of a transitive verb (patient) is treated differently (accusative).

- We run marathons. We sleep.
- They remember us.

In ergative-absolutive languages (e.g. Basque) it is the solitary argument of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb that are treated the same (morphologically or syntactically).  In languages with case, solitary argument of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb would have absolutive case. The agent of a transitive verb is treated differently (ergative case).

Some languages have both ergative and accusative morphology.