Respectively construction in English: A constraint-and construction-based approach

Postal (1998) and Gawron & Kehler (2004) have argued that Respectively Construction (RC) involving filler-gap constructions should be harder to account for under non-transformational approaches. Against their arguments, Chaves (2012), however, has claimed that the RC can be explained in HPSG without any difficulty. In doing so, Chaves proposes an HPSG account of the RC, assuming that sentences with 'respectively' will not differ in semantic and syntactic structure from those without it. In this paper, we argue that on the basis of the various properties of the RC, Chaves' assumption seems to be too strong or inaccurate, though most of his proposals on the RC can be accepted. To support our claim, we provide attested data such as RNRed RC from the corpus or the previous work and seek to give a proper account of RC in HPSG. (Kangwon National University)