Representing referential properties of nominals * Kaja Borthen (kaja.borthen@hf.ntnu.no) and Petter Haugereid (petterha@hf.ntnu.no) Norwegian University of Science and Technology Abstract. This paper concerns grammatical phenomena sensitive to certain classes of nominal forms, i.e. those that encode different kinds of referential properties of the nominal. We propose a grammar component for defining and picking out such semantic classes of nominal forms within typed feature structure formalisms such as the one used in HPSG, thus aiming at standardizing the representation of such phe- nomena. The grammar component includes four semantic features associated with the discourse referent of a nominal, i.e. cognitive status, specificity, partitivity, and whether the nominal has a universal interpretation or not. The proposed grammar component reduces to an assumed minimum a relatively large set of features that have already been proposed in analyses of the kind of phenomena at focus here, and it is hypothesized that parts of the structure are likely to be shared among grammars for different languages. Keywords: NP semantics, referential properties, cognitive status, specificity, par- titivity, universal interpretation, HPSG 1. Some phenomena A nominal’s form, such as what determiner it combines with or what inflectional form it has, may signal different kinds of referential proper- ties of the associated discourse referent. In this section, we will describe some phenomena in Norwegian, English, Dutch, and Turkish that can be argued to bear on such classes of nominal forms. 1.1. Norwegian light pronouns Norwegian so-called "light" pronouns (i.e. unaccented, definite pro- nouns) differ from all other nominals in Norwegian in that they can occupy the position in between a sentence’s main verb and a sentential adverb. Their validity in the light pronoun position is shown in (1a). As exemplified in (1b), all other types of nominals are prohibited in this position. * This paper has benefited from insightful comments from Frank van Eynde, two anonymous reviewers, and the audience of the workshop on Ideas and Strategies for Multilinguial Grammar Development in Vienna, 25-29 August 2003. We are also in grateful debt to Siri Simonsen for support with the formatting of this article and to Anders Søgaard for proof-reading the article. c  2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. KajaBorthenRLC-article.tex; 16/11/2004; 15:11; p.1