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Recently, Yoshida et al. (2014) propose a movement-plus-ellipsis analysis of the Why-Stripping construction with base-generation of why in the clause initial position. While agreeing with the idea of base-generated why in this construction, this paper argues that Yoshida et al. have a number of limitations, especially with respect to the clausal ellipsis requirement and the analysis of Stripping constructions with other adverbials. In this paper, a non-movement, non-ellipsis based analysis of the construction will be proposed on the basis of Ginzburg & Sag’s (2000) approach to fragment clauses. By incorporating Minimal Recursion Semantics representations, this paper also provides an account of question interpretations, focus-sensitive readings, and scope relations in why and other adverbial Stripping constructions.

While illocutionary force of exclamation is manifested by many different sentence types, it is controversial what kind of sentences have sentential force of exclamatives. Drawing upon some recent works such as Michaelis and Lambrecht (1996b), Ginzburg and Sag (2000), and Zanuttini and Portner (2003), this paper focuses on essential semantic properties of exclamatives, factivity and scalar implicature. We argue that in English, not only wh-exclamatives but also inverted exclamatives and nominal exclamatives are characterized as exclamative constructions by these semantic properties. Departing from Zanuttini and Portner (2003), who, linking such semantic properties to syntactic components, recognize a factive marker and wh-operator as key syntactic elements, this work proposes an analysis in which different syntactic forms exhibit the same core semantic properties of exclamatives. While none of the previous analyses account for the three different types of exclamatives, i.e., WH, inverted, and nominal exclamatives by a coherent mechanism, the present paper provides a unified account of their semantic properties within the framework of HPSG, with their syntactic differences taken care of by different phrasal type constraints.

This paper presents an analysis of quantifier and wh-operator scope in terms of a lexicalized theory of quantifier storage, within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The proposed analysis provides an alternative to the derivational approach wherein quantifier scope is determined at a separate level of representation via movement, and shows how scope of quantifiers and wh-phrases (fronted or in situ) can be handled in a unified way in a constraint-based grammar. Lexicalization of quantifier storage offers an account of scope facts in raising and unbounded dependency constructions which have been problematic in an earlier constraint-based approach to quantifier scope.

This paper investigates how the syntactic and semantic characteristics of floating quantifiers (FQ) in English can be explained within the framework of the Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Previous analyses treat FQs either basically as NP quantifiers (Postal 1974, Maling 1976, Sportiche 1988, Mccawley 1998), or as VP quantifiers that are syntactically and semantically distinct from NP quantifiers (Dowty & Brodie 1984). In contrast, this paper proposes an analysis in which FQs are base-generated VP modifiers as in Dowty & Brodie, but their logical (or semantic) contributions are made analogous to that of quantificational determiners, through a precise lexical description of FQs that specifies the information on "storage" and "retrieval" of the quantifier meaning. The proposed analysis is "lexical" in its nature in the sense that the syntactic and semantic properties concerning distribution and scope interaction are encoded as part of the lexical information that the FQs have.