Things are not always equal

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the use of subsumption as device to model linguistic generalizations. Constraint-based linguistic frameworks make ample use of equality relations but, although equality is nothing but two-way subsumption, subsumption itself has not been used much, except as a meta-grammatical device in the HPSG type hierarchy. Here we investigate two cases where subsumption is a useful device to model syntactic phenomena. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.