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The so-called floating quantifier constructions in languages like Korean display intriguing properties whose successful processing can prove the robustness of a parsing system. This paper shows that a constraint-based analysis, in particular couched upon the framework of HPSG, can offer us an efficient way of analyzing these constructions together with proper semantic representations. It also shows how the analysis has been successfully implemented in the LKB (Linguistic Knowledge Building) system.
Im Laufe der letzten Jahrzehnte haben in die Aspektologie und die ihr gewidmeten wissenschaftlichen Debatten zunehmend Versuche Einzug gehalten, die mit dem Ziel unternommen wurden und darauf ausgerichtet waren, die Lexik der Verben in den Mittelpunkt des Interesses zu rücken und in der Hoffnung darauf zu durchforsten, darin Hinweise aufzuspüren, die es gestatten, entsprechende verlässliche Rückschlüsse auf das von ihnen gezeitigte Aspektverhalten, d.h. die in dem jeweiligen Fall zutage tretende Art der der Imperfektiv-Perfektiv-Opposition zugrunde liegenden Bedeutung zu ziehen. In dem Bemühen, eine aspektuell relevante Verbklassifikation, d.h. eine solche, die sowohl über die Frage der aspektuellen Paarigkeit von Verben als auch über die semantischen Eigenschaften von Perfektivum und Imperfektivum innerhalb eines Aspektpaares Aufschluss erteilt, zu erstellen, musste man sich zunächst auf die Aufgabe zurückbesinnen, die die Sprache dem Aspekt zubedacht hat und die durch den morphologisch geschiedenen Gegensatz von Imperfektiva und Perfektiva wahrgenommen wird: die - von mir eindeutig ausschließlich in diesem Sinne so genannte - Aspektualität.
Children […] growing up with highly inflected languages such as Modern Greek will frequently hear different grammatical forms of a given lexeme used in different grammatical and semantic-pragmatic contexts. In spite of the fact that the Greek noun is not as highly inflected as the verb, acquisition of nominal inflection of this inflecting-fusional language is quite complex, comprising the three categories of case, number, and gender. As is usual in this type of language, the formation of case-number forms obeys different patterns that apply to largely arbitrary classes of nominal lexemes partially based on gender. Further, frequency of the occurrence of the three gender classes and case-number forms of nouns greatly differs in spoken Greek, regarding both the types and tokens. […] [A] child learning an inflecting-fusional language like Greek must construct different inflectional patterns depending not only on parts of speech but also on subclasses within a given part of speech, such as gender classes of nouns and inflectional classes within or (exceptionally) across genders. It is therefore to be expected that the early development of case and number distinctions will apply to specific nouns and subclasses of nouns rather than the totality of Greek nouns. The two main theoretical approaches of morphological development that will be discussed in the present paper are the usage-based approach and the pre- and protomorphology approach.
The Big Mess Construction
(2007)
There is a construction in English, exemplified by 'how long a bridge', which is so irregular that it has been named the Big Mess Construction (Berman 1974). This paper first sketches its main characteristics and a treatment of the internal structure of the noun phrase which serves as a background for the analysis. It then presents three ways in which the Big Mess Construction can be analysed; two of them are lexicalist and are shown to be implausible; the third is constructivist and is argued to be superior. In a next step, the discussion is extended to two other types of constructions. The first concerns the English adnominal reflexives, as in 'the children themselves', and is shown to require a constructivist analysis which is similar but not identical to the one for the Big Mess Construction. The second concerns the combination of 'such' and 'what' with the indefinite article, as in 'such a pleasure'. In spite of its obvious resemblance with the Big Mess Construction this combination does not require a constructivist analysis; instead, it fits the lexicalist mould of most of the rest of HPSG.
Humans possess a number concept that differs from its predecessors in animal cognition in two crucial respects: (1) it is based on a numerical sequence whose elements are not confined to quantitative contexts, but can indicate cardinal/quantitative as well as ordinal and even nominal properties of empirical objects (e.g. ‘five buses’: cardinal; ‘the fifth bus’: ordinal; ‘the #5 bus’: nominal), and (2) it can involve recursion and, via recursion, discrete infinity. In contrast to that, the predecessors of numerical cognition that we find in animals and human infants rely on finite and iconic representations that are limited to cardinality and do not support a unified concept of number. In this paper, I argue that the way such a unified number concept could evolve in humans is via verbal sequences that are employed as numerical tools, that is, sequences of words whose elements are associated with empirical objects in number assignments. In particular, I show that a certain kind of number words, namely the counting sequences of natural languages, can be characterised as a central instance of verbal numerical tools. I describe a possible scenario for the emergence of such verbal numerical tools in human history that starts from iconic roots and that suggests that in a process of co-evolution, the gradual emergence of counting sequences and the development of an increasingly comprehensive number concept supported each other. On this account, it is language that opened the way for numerical cognition, suggesting that it is no accident that the same species that possesses the language faculty as a unique trait, should also be the one that developed a systematic concept of number.
The Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning features a shared task, in which participants train and test their learning systems on the same data sets. In 2007, as in 2006, the shared task has been devoted to dependency parsing, this year with both a multilingual track and a domain adaptation track. In this paper, we define the tasks of the different tracks and describe how the data sets were created from existing treebanks for ten languages. In addition, we characterize the different approaches of the participating systems, report the test results, and provide a first analysis of these results.
This paper reconciles the standpoint that language users do not aim at improving their sound systems with the observation that languages seem to improve their sound systems. Computer simulations of inventories of sibilants show that Optimality-Theoretic learners who optimize their perception grammars automatically introduce a so-called prototype effect, i.e. the phenomenon that the learner’s preferred auditory realization of a certain phonological category is more peripheral than the average auditory realization of this category in her language environment. In production, however, this prototype effect is counteracted by an articulatory effect that limits the auditory form to something that is not too difficult to pronounce. If the prototype effect and the articulatory effect are of a different size, the learner must end up with an auditorily different sound system from that of her language environment. The computer simulations show that, independently of the initial auditory sound system, a stable equilibrium is reached within a small number of generations. In this stable state, the dispersion of the sibilants of the language strikes an optimal balance between articulatory ease and auditory contrast. The important point is that this is derived within a model without any goal-oriented elements such as dispersion constraints.