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An HPSG Analysis of German Depictive Secondary Predicates

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Abstract

I will provide German data that shows that depicitve secondary predicates may refer to subjects, direct objects, indirect objects, and even more oblique complements. Reference to more oblique arguments is more marked. The markedness corresponds to the obliqueness hierarchy that was proposed by Keenan and Comrie [13] and others. Based on these observations I will suggest analyzing depictive secondary predicates parallel to control constructions rather than raising constructions. Since depictives can refer to arguments that do not surface, the analysis makes reference to the underlying syntactic-semantic representation: the argument-structure.

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Thanks to Berthold Crysmann, Christian Dütschmann, Tibor Kiss, Bob Levine for stimulating discussions during conferences, workshops, summer schools, and various other occasions. The research carried out for this paper was in part supported by a research grant from the German Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie (BMBF) to the DFKI project WHITEBOARD (“Multilevel Annotation for Dynamic Free Text Processing”), FKZ 01 IW 002.