Danish in
     Head-Driven
     Phrase Structure
     Grammar
     Stefan Müller and Bjarne Ørsnes
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               DRAFTDRAFT
       Preface
       eaimofthisbookistwofold:Firstwewanttoprovideaprecisedescriptionofalarge
       fragment of the Danish language that is useful for readers regardless of the linguistic
       framework they work in. is fragment comprises not only core phenomena such as
       constituent order and passivizating, but to a large extent also a number of less-studied
       phenomena which we believe to be of interest, not only for the description of Danish
       (andothermainlandScandinavianlanguages),butalsoforcomparativeworkingeneral.
       It has been an important goal for us to base our analyses on comprehensive, empirically
       sound descriptions of the studied phenomena. For that reason we mainly use real data
       extracted from a corpus or from web-pages. e second aim of the book is to provide a
       fully formalized linguistic theory of the described fragment that is provably internally
       consistent and furthermore compatible with psycholinguistic theories and with insights
       abouthumanlanguagefromlanguageacquisitionresearch.elinguistictheorywillbe
       workedoutintheframeworkofHead-DrivenPhraseStructureGrammar(Pollard&Sag
       , ), but readers who donotcareaboutformallinguisticsorthisparticularbranch
       of formal linguistics do not have to worry: the book is organized in a way that makes
       it possible to read the descriptive parts of the respective chapters without reading the
       analysis parts. However, we think that dealing with the analyses will result in a beer
       understandingofthelanguagefacts,soitmaybeworthwiletoreadtheanalysissections
       even for those who are new to HPSG.
        In what follows we describe the project and the guiding linguistic assumptions in
       moredetailandthenmakesomebriefremarksaboutDanishandthedatawehaveused.
          eProject
          isbookispartofalargerproject,calledCoreGram,withthegoaltodeveloplargescale
          computer processable grammar fragments of several languages that share a common
          core (Müller a,b). Currently we work on the following languages:
            • German(Müller b, b; Müller & Ørsnes )
            • Danish (Ørsnes b; Müller b; Müller & Ørsnes , In Preparation)
            • Persian (Müller b; Müller & Ghayoomi ; Müller, Samvelian & Bonami In
             Preparation)
            • Maltese (Müller a)
            • Mandarin Chinese (Lipenkova ; Müller & Lipenkova , )
            • Yiddish (Müller & Ørsnes )
            • English
            • Spanish
            • French
          FortheimplementationweusetheTRALEsystem(Meurers,Penn&Richter;Penn
          ), which allows for a rather direct encoding of HPSG analyses (Melnik ). e
          grammarsofGerman,Danish,Persian,Maltese,andMandarinChineseareofnon-trivial
          size and can be downloaded at http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/Projects/CoreGram.html. ey
          are also part of the version of the Grammix CD-rom (Müller a) that is distributed
          with this book. e grammars of Yiddish and English are toy grammars that are used
          to verify cross-linguistic analyses of special phenomena and the work on Spanish and
          French is part of work in the Sonderforschungsbereich  which just started. See Bild-
          hauer () for an implemented grammar of Spanish that will be converted into the
          format of the grammars mentioned above.
           Webelieve that books are the best way to document such fragments since it is oen
          not possible to construct a coherent view of one language from journal articles. e
          reason is that journal articles tend to need a long time from first submission to final
          publication and sometimes basic assumptions may have changed during the develop-
          ment of the linguistic theory in the meantime. e first book in this series was Müller
          (b), which describes a fragment of German that is implemented in the grammar
          BerliGram. Another book on the Persian Grammar developed in the PerGram project is
          in preparation (Müller, Samvelian & Bonami In Preparation).
           esituationinmainstreamformallinguisticshasoenbeencriticized:basicassump-
          tions are changed in high frequency, sometimes without sufficient motivation. Some
          concepts are not worked out in detail and formal underpinnings are unclear (see for in-
          stance Gazdar, Klein, Pullum & Sag : p.; Pullum , , : p.; Kornai &
          iv                            DraofOctober , , :