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(2007)
In this paper, we will argue for a novel analysis of the auxiliary alternation in Early English, its development and subsequent loss which has broader consequences for the way that auxiliary selection is looked at cross-linguistically. We will present evidence that the choice of auxiliaries accompanying past participles in Early English differed in several significant respects from that in the familiar modern European languages. Specifically, while the construction with have became a full-fledged perfect by some time in the ME period, that with be was actually a stative resultative, which it remained until it was lost. We will show that this accounts for some otherwise surprising restrictions on the distribution of BE in Early English and allows a better understanding of the spread of HAVE through late ME and EModE. Perhaps more importantly, the Early English facts also provide insight into the genesis of the kind of auxiliary selection found in German, Dutch and Italian. Our analysis of them furthermore suggests a promising strategy for explaining cross-linguistic variation in auxiliary selection in terms of variation in the syntactico-semantic structure of the perfect. In this introductory section, we will first provide some background on the historical situation we will be discussing, then we will lay out the main claims for which we will be arguing in the paper.
In this paper, we introduce an extension of the XMG system (eXtensibleMeta-Grammar) in order to allow for the description of Multi-Component Tree Adjoining Grammars. In particular, we introduce the XMG formalism and its implementation, and show how the latter makes it possible to extend the system relatively easily to different target formalisms, thus opening the way towards multi-formalism.
In this paper we will explore the similarities and differences between two feature logic-based approaches to the composition of semantic representations. The first approach is formulated for Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG, Joshi and Schabes 1997), the second is Lexical Ressource Semantics (LRS, Richter and Sailer 2004) and was first defined in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The two frameworks have several common characteristics that make them easy to compare: 1 They use languages of two sorted type theory for semantic representations. 2. They allow underspecification. LTAG uses scope constraints while LRS provides component-of contraints. 3 They use feature logics for computing semantic representations. 4. they are designed for computational applications. By comparing the two frameworks we will also point outsome characteristics and advantages of feature logic-based semantic computation in genereal.
We adopt Markert and Nissim (2005)’s approach of using the World Wide Web to resolve cases of coreferent bridging for German and discuss the strength and weaknesses of this approach. As the general approach of using surface patterns to get information on ontological relations between lexical items has only been tried on English, it is also interesting to see whether the approach works for German as well as it does for English and what differences between these languages need to be accounted for. We also present a novel approach for combining several patterns that yields an ensemble that outperforms the best-performing single patterns in terms of both precision and recall.
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. This way of characterizing MCTAG does not allow to abstract away from the concrete order of derivation. 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 (in the underlying TAG) the MCTAG licences. This definition gives a better understanding of the formalism, it allows a more systematic comparison of different types of MCTAG, and, furthermore, it can be exploited for parsing.
In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of a wide range of features for their usefulness in the resolution of nominal coreference, both as hard constraints (i.e. completely removing elements from the list of possible candidates) as well as soft constraints (where a cumulation of violations of soft constraints will make it less likely that a candidate is chosen as the antecedent). We present a state of the art system based on such constraints and weights estimated with a maximum entropy model, using lexical information to resolve cases of coreferent bridging.
The work presented here addresses the question of how to determine whether a grammar formalism is powerful enough to describe natural languages. The expressive power of a formalism can be characterized in terms of i) the string languages it generates (weak generative capacity (WGC)) or ii) the tree languages it generates (strong generative capacity (SGC)). The notion of WGC is not enough to determine whether a formalism is adequate for natural languages. We argue that even SGC is problematic since the sets of trees a grammar formalism for natural languages should be able to generate is difficult to determine. The concrete syntactic structures assumed for natural languages depend very much on theoretical stipulations and empirical evidence for syntactic structures is rather hard to obtain. Therefore, for lexicalized formalisms, we propose to consider the ability to generate certain strings together with specific predicate argument dependencies as a criterion for adequacy for natural languages.
The causative/anticausative alternation has been the topic of much typological and theoretical discussion in the linguistic literature. This alternation is characterized by verbs with transitive and intransitive uses, such that the transitive use of a verb V means roughly "cause to Vintransitive" (see Levin 1993). The discussion revolves around two issues: the first one concerns the similarities and differences between the anticausative and the passive, and the second one concerns the derivational relationship, if any, between the transitive and intransitive variant. With respect to the second issue, a number of approaches have been developed. Judging the approach conceptually unsatisfactory, according to which each variant is assigned an independent lexical entry, it was concluded that the two variants have to be derivationally related. The question then is which one of the two is basic and where this derivation takes place in the grammar. Our contribution to this discussion is to argue against derivational approaches to the causative / anticausative alternation. We focus on the distribution of PPs related to external arguments (agent, causer, instrument, causing event) in passives and anticausatives of English, German and Greek and the set of verbs undergoing the causative/anticausative alternation in these languages. We argue that the crosslinguistic differences in these two domains provide evidence against both causativization and detransitivization analyses of the causative / anticausative alternation. We offer an approach to this alternation which builds on a syntactic decomposition of change of state verbs into a Voice and a CAUS component. Crosslinguistic variation in passives and anticausatives depends on properties of Voice and its combinations with CAUS and various types of roots.
This paper presents an approach to the question whether it is possible to construct a parser based on ideas from case-based reasoning. Such a parser would employ a partial analysis of the input sentence to select a (nearly) complete syntax tree and then adapt this tree to the input sentence. The experiments performed on German data from the Tüba-D/Z treebank and the KaRoPars partial parser show that a wide range of levels of generality can be reached, depending on which types of information are used to determine the similarity between input sentence and training sentences. The results are such that it is possible to construct a case-based parser. The optimal setting out of those presented here need to be determined empirically.