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This paper provides a treatment of Polish Plural Comitative Constructions in the paradigm of HPSG in the tradition of Pollard and Sag (1994). Plural Comitative Constructions (PCCs) have previously been treated in terms of coordination, complementation and adjunction. The objective of this paper is to show that PCCs are neither instances of typical coordinate structures nor of typical complement or adjunct structures. It thus appears difficult to properly describe them by means of the standard principles of syntax and semantics. The analysis proposed in this paper accounts for the syntactic and semantic properties of PCCs in Polish by assuming an adjunction-based syntactic structure for PCCs, and by treating the indexical information provided by PCCs not as subject to any inheritance or composition, but as a result of applying a set of principles on number, gender and person resolution that also hold for ordinary coordinate structures.
This thesis deals with expressions consisting of two noun phrases connected by a comitative preposition, referred to as comitative constructions (CCs). It focuses on CCs in Polish, with some comparisons to other languages, and provides an analysis at the morphosyntax-semantics-pragmatics interface in the paradigm of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar with the integrated model-theoretic semantic framework of Lexicalized Flexible Ty2. After postulating three different readings of Polish CCs: accompanitive, conjunctive and (open and closed) inclusive, a number of semantic phenomena are discussed which provide evidence for this classification. Further examination of the data shows that all CC types behave uniformly with regard to their syntactic properties but exhibit differences regarding agreement and person, number and gender resolution. These differences have previously been explained by syntactic stipulations. This thesis argues that a syntactic approach to CCs lacks real empirical motivation and it demonstrates that some of the existing analyses are problematic for a number of empirical and / or theoretical reasons. It further offers an alternative analysis based on the assumption that all CC types have a uniform, adjunctionbased syntactic structure, and that the crucial differences between them are semantic in nature, being triggered by the meaning of the comitative preposition. The core of the proposed semantic analysis are three different logical representations of the comitative preposition, whose truth conditions allow us to make the right predictions about the different behavior of the three CC types. All other lexical components of CCs, including plural pronouns, bear in each type of CC their customary forms and meanings. Implementing this idea in a constraint-based framework whose description language incorporates a formal semantic representation language, and modeling the morphosyntactic, semantic, pragmatic and referential properties of CCs within a single grammatical paradigm, we arrive at an analysis that accounts for these expressions in a very natural way.