A frame-based semantics of the dative alternation in Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars

It is well-known that the meaning of a verb-based construction does not only depend on the lexical meaning of the verb but also on its specific syntagmatic environment. Lexical meaning interacts with constructional meaning in intricate ways and this interaction is crucial for theories of argument linking and the syntax-semantics interface. These insights have led proponents of Construction Grammar to treating every linguistic expression as a construction (Goldberg 1995). But the influence of the syntagmatic context on the constitution of verb meaning has also been taken into account by lexicalist approaches to argument realization (e.g. Van Valin & LaPolla 1997). The crucial question for any theory of the syntax-semantic interface is how the meaning components are distributed over the lexical and morphosyntactic units of a linguistic expression and how these components combine. In this paper, we describe a grammar model that is sufficiently flexible with respect to the factorization and combination of lexical and constructional units both on the syntactic and the semantic level. The proposed grammar description framework combines Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars (LTAG) with decompositional frame semantics and makes use of a constraint-based, ‘metagrammatical’ specification of the elementary syntactic and semantic structures. The LTAG formalism has the following two key properties (Joshi & Schabes 1997): (i) Extended domain of locality: The full argument projection of a lexical item can be represented by a single elementary tree. The domain of locality with respect to dependency is thus larger in LTAG than in grammars based on context-free rules. Elementary trees can have a complex constituent structure. (ii) Factoring recursion from the domain of dependencies: Constructions related to iteration and recursion are modeled by the operation of adjunction. Examples are attributive and adverbial modification. Through adjunction, the local dependencies encoded by elementary trees can become long-distance dependencies in the derived trees. Bangalore & Joshi (2010) subsume the properties (i) and (ii) under the slogan ‘complicate locally, simplify globally.’ The idea is that basically all linguistic constraints are specified over the local domains represented by elementary trees and, as a consequence, the composition of elementary trees can be expressed by the two general operations substitution and adjunction. This view on the architecture of grammar, which underlies LTAG, has direct consequences for