Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Conference Proceeding (9)
- Preprint (4)
- Book (3)
- Report (3)
- Working Paper (3)
- Article (2)
- Part of a Book (2)
Language
- English (26) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (26)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (26)
Keywords
- Grammatik (26) (remove)
Institute
Traditionally, the term "grammatical relation" (GR) refers to the morphosyntactic properties that relate an argument to a clause, as, for example, its subject or its object. Alternative terms are "syntactic function" or "syntactic role", and they highlight the fact that GRs are defined by the way in which arguments are integrated syntactically into a clause, i.e. by functioning as subject, object etc. Whatever terminology one prefers, what is crucial about the traditional notion of GRs is (a) that they are identified by syntactic properties, and (b) that they relate an argument to the clause.
I discuss the status of WH-words for interrogative interpretations, and show that the derivation of constituent questions evolves from a specific interplay of syntactic and semantic representations with pragmatics. I argue that WH-pronouns are not ‘interrogative’. Rather, they are underspecified elements; due to this underspecification, WH-words can form a constitutive part not only of interrogative, but also of exclamative and declarative clauses. WH-words introduce a variable of a particular conceptual domain into the semantic representation. Accordingly, they have to be specified for interpretation. Different WH-contexts give rise to different interpretations. In a cross-linguistic overview, I discuss the characteristic elements contributing to the derivation of interrogatives. I argue that specific particles or their phonologically empty counterparts in the head of CP contribute the interrogative aspect. The speech act of ‘asking’ is then carried out via an intonational contour that identifies a question. By default, this intonational contour operates on interrogative sentences; however, other sentence formats – in particular, those of declarative sentences – are possible as well. The distinction of (a) grammatical (syntactic, semantic and phonological) sentence formats for interrogative and declarative sentences, and (b) intonational contours serving the discrimination of speech acts like questions and assertions, can be related to psychological and neurological evidence.
This volume brings together a cross-section of recent research on the grammar and representation of pronouns, centering around the typology of pronominal paradigms, the generation of syntactic and semantic representations for constructions containing pronouns, and the neurological underpinnings for linguistic distinctions that are relevant for the production and interpretation of these constructions. In this introductory chapter we first give an exposition of our topic (section 2). Taking the interpretation of pronouns as a starting point, we discuss the basic parameters of pronominal representations, and draw a general picture of how morphological, semantic, discourse-pragmatic and syntactic aspects come together. In section 3, we sketch the different domains of research that are concerned with these phenomena, and the particular questions they are interested in, and show how the papers in the present volume fit into the picture. Section 4 gives summaries of the individual papers, and a short synopsis of their main points of convergence.
In this paper we present a parsing architecture that allows processing of different mildly context-sensitive formalisms, in particular Tree-Adjoining Grammar (TAG), Multi-Component Tree-Adjoining Grammar with Tree Tuples (TT-MCTAG) and simple Range Concatenation Grammar (RCG). Furthermore, for tree-based grammars, the parser computes not only syntactic analyses but also the corresponding semantic representations.
Multicomponent Tree Adjoining Grammars (MCTAG) is a formalism that has been shown to be useful for many natural language applications. The definition of MCTAG however is problematic since it refers to the process of the derivation itself: a simultaneity constraint must be respected concerning the way the members of the elementary tree sets are added. Looking only at the result of a derivation (i.e., the derived tree and the derivation tree), this simultaneity is no longer visible and therefore cannot be checked. I.e., this way of characterizing MCTAG does not allow to abstract away from the concrete order of derivation. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an alternative definition of MCTAG that characterizes the trees in the tree language of an MCTAG via the properties of the derivation trees the MCTAG licences.