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Semantic research over the past three decades has provided impressive confirmation of Donald Davidsons famous claim that “there is a lot of language we can make systematic sense of if we suppose events exist” (Davidson 1980:137). Nowadays, Davidsonian event arguments are no longer reserved only for action verbs (as Davidson originally proposed) or even only for the category of verbs, but instead are widely assumed to be associated with any kind of predicate (e.g. Higginbotham 2000, Parsons 2000).1 The following quotation from Higginbotham and Ramchand (1997) illustrates the reasoning that motivates this move: "Once we assume that predicates (or their verbal, etc. heads) have a position for events, taking the many consequences that stem therefrom, as outlined in publications originating with Donald Davidson (1967), and further applied in Higginbotham (1985, 1989), and Terence Parsons (1990), we are not in a position to deny an event-position to any predicate; for the evidence for, and applications of, the assumption are the same for all predicates. (Higginbotham and Ramchand 1997:54)" In fact, since Davidson’s original proposal the burden of proof for postulating event arguments seems to have shifted completely, leading Raposo and Uriagereka (1995), for example, to the following verdict: "it is unclear what it means for a predicate not to have a Davidsonian argument (Raposo and Uriagereka 1995:182)" That is, Davidsonian eventuality arguments apparently have become something like a trademark for predicates in general. The goal of the present paper is to subject this view of the relationship between predicates and events to real scrutiny. By taking a closer look at the simplest independent predicational structure – viz. copula sentences – I will argue that current Davidsonian approaches tend to stretch the notion of events too far, thereby giving up much of its linguistic and ontological usefulness. More specifically, the paper will tackle the following three questions: 1. Do copula sentences support the current view of the inherent event-relatedness of predicates? 2. If not, what is a possible alternative to an event-based analysis of copula sentences? 3. What does this tell us about Davidsonian events? The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 first reviews current event-based analyses of copula sentences and then gives a brief summary of the Davidsonian notion of events. Section 3 examines the behavior of copula sentences with respect to some standard (as well as some new) eventuality diagnostics. Copula expressions will turn out to fail all eventuality tests. They differ sharply from state verbs like stand, sit, sleep in this respect. (The latter pass all eventuality tests and therefore qualify as true “Davidsonian state” expressions.) On the basis of these observations, section 4 provides an alternative account of copula sentences that combines Kim’s (1969, 1976) notion of property exemplifications with Ashers (1993, 2000) conception of abstract objects. Specifically, I will argue that the copula introduces a referential argument for a temporally bound property exemplification (= “Kimian state”). The proposal is implemented within a DRT framework. Finally, section 5 offers some concluding remarks and suggests that supplementing Davidsonian eventualities by Kimian states not only yields a more adequate analysis for copula expressions and the like but may also improve our treatment of events.
A pragmatic explanation of the stage level/individual level contrast in combination with locatives
(2004)
One important difference between stage level predicates (SLPs) and individual level predicates (ILPs) is their behavior with respect to locative modifiers. It is commonly assumed that SLPs but not ILPs combine with locatives. The present study argues against a semantic account for this behavior (as advanced by e.g. Kratzer 1995, Chierchia 1995) and proposes a genuinely pragmatic explanation of the observed stage level/individual level contrast instead. The proposal is spelled out using Blutners (1998, 2000) optimality theoretic version of the Gricean maxims. Building on the observation that the respective locatives are not event-related but frame-setting modifiers, the preference for main predicates that express temporary properties is explained as a side-effect of “synchronizing” the main predicate with the locative frame in the course of finding an optimal interpretation. By emphasizing the division of labor between grammar and pragmatics, the proposed solution takes a considerable load off of semantics.
The study offers a discourse-based account of the Spanish copula forms ser and estar, which are generally considered to be lexical exponents of the stage-level/individual-level contrast. It argues against the popular view that the distinction between SLPs and ILPs rests on a fundamental cognitive division of the world that is reflected in the grammar. As it happens, conceptual oppositions like “temporary vs. permanent” or “arbitrary vs. essential“ provide only a preference for the interpretation of estar and ser. In addition, the evidence for an SLP/ILP impact on the grammar turns out to be far less conclusive than is currently assumed. The study argues against event-based accounts of the ser/estar contrast in particular, showing that ser and estar pattern alike in failing all of the standard eventuality tests. The discourse-based account proposed instead assumes that ser and estar both display the same lexical semantics (which is identical to the semantics of English be, German sein, etc.); estar differs from ser only in presupposing a relation to a specific discourse situation. By using estar a speaker restricts his or her claim to a specific discourse situation, whereas by using ser, the speaker makes no such restriction. The preference for interpreting estar predications as denoting temporary properties and ser predications as denoting permanent properties follows from economy principles driving the pragmatic legitimation of estars discourse dependence. The analysis proposed in this paper can also account for the observation that ser predications do not give rise to thetic judgements. The proposal is couched in terms of the framework of DRT.
In recent years, research in parsing has extended in several new directions. One of these directions is concerned with parsing languages other than English. Treebanks have become available for many European languages, but also for Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese. However, it was shown that parsing results on these treebanks depend on the types of treebank annotations used. Another direction in parsing research is the development of dependency parsers. Dependency parsing profits from the non-hierarchical nature of dependency relations, thus lexical information can be included in the parsing process in a much more natural way. Especially machine learning based approaches are very successful (cf. e.g.). The results achieved by these dependency parsers are very competitive although comparisons are difficult because of the differences in annotation. For English, the Penn Treebank has been converted to dependencies. For this version, Nivre et al. report an accuracy rate of 86.3%, as compared to an F-score of 92.1 for Charniaks parser. The Penn Chinese Treebank is also available in a constituent and a dependency representations. The best results reported for parsing experiments with this treebank give an F-score of 81.8 for the constituent version and 79.8% accuracy for the dependency version. The general trend in comparisons between constituent and dependency parsers is that the dependency parser performs slightly worse than the constituent parser. The only exception occurs for German, where F-scores for constituent plus grammatical function parses range between 51.4 and 75.3, depending on the treebank, NEGRA or TüBa-D/Z. The dependency parser based on a converted version of Tüba-D/Z, in contrast, reached an accuracy of 83.4%, i.e. 12 percent points better than the best constituent analysis including grammatical functions.
This paper profiles significant differences in syntactic distribution and differences in word class frequencies for two treebanks of spoken and written German: the TüBa-D/S, a treebank of transliterated spontaneous dialogues, and the TüBa-D/Z treebank of newspaper articles published in the German daily newspaper die tageszeitung´(taz). The approach can be used more generally as a means of distinguishing and classifying language corpora of different genres.
This paper profiles significant differences in syntactic distribution and differences in word class frequencies for two treebanks of spoken and written German: the TüBa-D/S, a treebank of transliterated spontaneous dialogs, and the TüBa-D/Z treebank of newspaper articles published in the German daily newspaper ´die tageszeitung´(taz). The approach can be used more generally as a means of distinguishing and classifying language corpora of different genres.
A cladistic analysis is presented of the hawkmoths of the tribe Acherontiini, Morgan´s Sphinx (Xanthopan morganii (Walker», and related genera. The study aims to test the monophyly of tribe Acherontiini; the hypothesis that all taxa with extremely long probosces (some Acherontiini, Meganoton rubescens, Neococytius, Xanthopan) form a monophyletic group, or at least fall within a single reasonably compact clade; and, within this group, to determine whether Xanthopan is more closely related to Acherontiini or to COCytillS and Neococytius. The data set comprises 109 characters derived from adult and immature stage morphology, biology and behaviour. These data were analysed using equal weighting, successive approximations character weighting (SACW) and implied weighting. All weighting schemes agreed on the monophyly of Acherontiini and of a group of genera comprising Amphimoea, Cocytius and Neococytius (the Cocytius group). Several other generic and suprageneric clades were also consistently recovered. However, those hawkmoths with extremely long probosces were never recovered as a monophyletic group. The relationships of Xanthopan were also ambiguous. Equal weighting and SACW placedXanthopan + Meganoton rztbescens (Butler) as sister to the COCytills group, while implied weighting placed Xanthopan as sister to Acherontiini. This latter relationship is based primarily on shared possession of a pilifer/palp hearing organ. Further analyses suggested the two components of this organ were not biologically independent. Downweighting this feature accordingly resulted in all weighting schemes converging on the topology found by equal weighting. Exclusion of the incomplete subset of immature stage data had no effect under implied weighting but equal weighting and SACW now recovered a Neotropical clade comprising Manduca. and the Cocytius group, while Xanthopan was placed with M. rubescens and Panogena. Downweighting the pilifer/palp hearing organ under implied weighting again caused convergence with the equal weighting/SACW results. Thus, the relationships of Xanthopan remain equivocal and further data, particularly from the immature stages, will be required to elucidate its phylogenetic position further.
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.
Quantitative evaluation of parsers has traditionally centered around the PARSEVAL measures of crossing brackets, (labeled) precision, and (labeled) recall. However, it is well known that these measures do not give an accurate picture of the quality of the parsers output. Furthermore, we will show that they are especially unsuited for partial parsers. In recent years, research has concentrated on dependencybased evaluation measures. We will show in this paper that such a dependency-based evaluation scheme is particularly suitable for partial parsers. TüBa-D, the treebank used here for evaluation, contains all the necessary dependency information so that the conversion of trees into a dependency structure does not have to rely on heuristics. Therefore, the dependency representations are not only reliable, they are also linguistically motivated and can be used for linguistic purposes.
The purpose of this paper is to describe the TüBa-D/Z treebank of written German and to compare it to the independently developed TIGER treebank (Brants et al., 2002). Both treebanks, TIGER and TüBa-D/Z, use an annotation framework that is based on phrase structure grammar and that is enhanced by a level of predicate-argument structure. The comparison between the annotation schemes of the two treebanks focuses on the different treatments of free word order and discontinuous constituents in German as well as on differences in phrase-internal annotation.
The earliest known extensive texts in Gullah (and perhaps African American Vernacular English as well) to appear in print were published in The Riverside Magazine for Young People in November, 1868, under the title "Negro Fables" (p. 505-507). These are four animal stories, which the editor of the magazine, Horace Elisha Scudder, described in his column only as having been "taken down from the lips of an old negro, in the vicinity of Charleston" (see Appendix for the editor´s comments and the full text of the stories).2 The Story-Teller was evidently a genuine "man of words" (Abrahams, 1983), a true raconteur who could artistically embellish a simple traditional account (perhaps further embellished by the transcriber) in a variety of ways. That he commanded a certain range of Gullah is evident from particular signature features in the texts, but the absence of other typical Gullah features and the presence of shared Gullah/African American Vernacular English usages, together with the periodic appearance of standard English forms, demonstrate that these texts provide perhaps the earliest actual documentation (apart from early tertiary comments, cited e.g. in Feagin, 1997, p. 128-129) of register variation or style/code-switching among Gullah speakers. ...
The ACL 2008 Workshop on Parsing German features a shared task on parsing German. The goal of the shared task was to find reasons for the radically different behavior of parsers on the different treebanks and between constituent and dependency representations. In this paper, we describe the task and the data sets. In addition, we provide an overview of the test results and a first analysis.
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.
Recent approaches to Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) generally fall into two classes: (1) information-intensive approaches and (2) information-poor approaches. Our hypothesis is that for memory-based learning (MBL), a reduced amount of data is more beneficial than the full range of features used in the past. Our experiments show that MBL combined with a restricted set of features and a feature selection method that minimizes the feature set leads to competitive results, outperforming all systems that participated in the SENSEVAL-3 competition on the Romanian data. Thus, with this specific method, a tightly controlled feature set improves the accuracy of the classifier, reaching 74.0% in the fine-grained and 78.7% in the coarse-grained evaluation.
Das Chunkparsing bietet einen besonders vielversprechenden Ansatz zum robusten, partiellen Parsing mit dem Ziel einer breiten Datenabdeckung. Ziel beim Chunkparsing ist eine partielle, nicht-rekursive syntaktische Struktur. Dieser extrem effiziente Parsing-Ansatz läßt sich als Kaskade endlicher Transducer realisieren. In diesem Beitrag wird TüSBL vorgestellt, ein System, bei dem die Eingabe aus spontaner, gesprochener Spache besteht, die dem Parser in Form eines Worthypothesengraphen aus einem Spracherkenner zur Verfügung gestellt wird. Chunkparsing ist für eine solche Anwendung besonders geeignet, da es fragmentarische oder nicht wohlgeformte Äußerungen robust behandeln kann. Des weiteren wird eine Baumkonstruktionskomponente vorgestellt, die die partiellen Chunkstrukturen zu vollständigen Bäumen mit grammatischen Funktionen erweitert. Das System wird anhand manuell überprüfter Systemeingaben evaluiert, da sich die üblichen Evaluationsparameter hierfür nicht eignen.
Geschlechts- und Gattungsunterschiede an Metapodien und Phalangen mitteleuropäischer Wildwiederkäuer
(1968)
Zur Beurteilung der Geschechtsunterschiede und zur Bestimmung der Gattungsunterschiede wurden die Metapodien und Phalangen von im ganzen 258 Exemplaren von Cervus elaphus hippelaphus Erxleben, 1771, Dama dama dama (Linne, 1758), Capreolus capreolus capreolus (Linne, 1758), Rupicapra rupicapra rupicapra (Linne, 1758) und Capra ibex ibex Linne, 1758, ausgewertet. 93 Tiere entfielen auf Capreolus capreolus, von denen aber zur Geschlechtsunterscheidung nur 78 Tiere verwendbar waren; die restlichen 15 Tiere waren ohne Geschlechtsangabe und konnten auch nachträglich nicht bestimmt werden. Weiterhin kamen zur Untersuchung 56 Tiere von Cervus elaphus, 22 von Dama dama, 49 von Rupicapra rupicapra und 38 von Capra ibex (5. Tab. 1).
Was die Geschlechtsunterscheidung betrifft, so gilt mit Ausnahme von Capreolus capreolus die Regel, daß die Metapodien und Phalangen der Weibchen alles in allem länger und stärker sind als die der Männchen. Zur Bestimmung erwies sich die Länge des jeweiligen Knochens - an der Phalanx 3 die diagonale Sohlenlänge - als am besten geeignet. Dabei ließen sich Gesmlechtsunterschiede nicht nur in den Mittelwerten aufzeigen, sondern auch zum Teil in absolut größeren Maßen, wie das bei Dama in der Länge und bei Caprn ibex in der Breite der Fall war (s. Tab. 2-7).
Für die Unterscheidung zwischen den Gattungen waren in erster Linie Gestaltunterschiede von Bedeutung, in zweiter Linie die absoluten Maße und Indices, wovon letztere für sich allein oft schon Gattungsbestimmungen zulassen. Die Unterscheidung der hier behandelten Arten ist nahezu immer möglich, wenn man davon absieht, daß unter Siedlungsabfällen kleine, uncharakteristische Fragmente sein können. Schwierigkeiten können entstehen bei der Unterscheidung von Steinbock- sowie manchen Gemsenknochen von solchen der Gattungen Capra hircus und Ovis ades; auf sie wurde in dieser Arbeit nicht näher eingegangen.
Die Rose und der Winter
(1893)