Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Conference Proceeding (14)
- Part of a Book (5)
- Working Paper (5)
- Article (3)
- Preprint (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (28)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (28) (remove)
Keywords
- Grammatiktheorie (28) (remove)
Institute
- Extern (6)
Comparison of the ellipsis-based theory of non-constituent coordination with its alternatives
(2012)
In this paper, I compare the ellipsis-based theory of non-constituent coordination proposed in Yatabe (2001) with three of its alternatives, namely the theory that has been widely accepted within the context of Categorial Grammar, Mouret's HPSG-based theory, and the theory proposed by Bachrach and Katzir in the framework of the Minimalist Program. It is found (i) that the CG-based theory of non-constituent coordination cannot deal with medial RNR, i.e. a subset of right-node raising constructions in which either all or a part of the right-node-raised material is realized at a location other than the right edge of the final conjunct, (ii) that Mouret's theory encounters similar difficulties when applied to RNR, and (iii) that Bachrach and Katzir's theory cannot be applied to left-node raising in English, has difficulty capturing the semantic inertness of medial RNR, and overgenerates in several ways. The ellipsis-based theory, on the other hand, appears to be consistent with all the observations.
A compound matrix
(2004)
This paper presents a suplement to the Grammar Matrix, namely what I call a Compound Matrix ; in reality, it is not a matrix, since the type file includes a fully specified cross-linguistic inventory of compound types. The idea is that the grammar writer can comment out the ungrammatical types for his or her own language. The theory behind the typology is presented here in a bottom-up fashion, from the basic assumptions to the actual linguistic types.
We present a method for automatic RMRS semantics construction from dependency structures, following the semantic algebra of Copestake et al. (2001). We have applied this method to a subset of the TIGER Dependency Bank for German (Forst et al., 2004) to obtain a semantic treebank for (HPSG) parser evaluation. We describe the semantics construction mechanism and give evaluation figures from manual validation of the treebank. These indicate high precision of the automatic RMRS construction process.
These notes grew out of my preoccupation with writing a grammar of a particular language, Cahuilla, which is spoken in Southern California and belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family. [...] The Introduction to the Grammar as a whole – of which two sections are reproduced here in a modified version – tries to integrate the synoptic views of the different chapters into a series of comprehensive statements. The statements cluster around two topics: 1. A presentation of Cahuilla as a type of language. 2. Remarks on writing a grammar.
Ausgangspunkt: Die Kritik am "Zwei-Welten-Modell": Die grundlegende linguistische Unterscheidung zwischen "Sprache" und "Sprechen" ist im Rahmen der neueren Debatten um Sprachmedialität wieder verstärkt thematisiert und kritisiert worden. Lässt sich dieses schulbildende, in der Linguistik geradezu eherne Begriffspaar überhaupt noch sinnvollerweise aufrechterhalten? Oder muss es mindestens umdefiniert, vielleicht sogar gänzlich verworfen werden? Hat sich insbesondere die auf Chomsky zurückgehende Unterscheidung von Sprachkompetenz und -performanz nicht von selbst ad absurdum geführt, nachdem der linguistische Kognitivismus chomskyscher Provenienz Sprache als lebendiges Phänomen, als Medium menschlicher Kommunikation, vollständig aus dem Blick verloren hat? Führt nicht schon die scheinbar harmlose linguistische Differenzierung zwischen einer Sprachregel und ihrer Anwendung zu einer irreführenden und unangemessenen Verdinglichung von Sprache? ...
Die Grundlagen der heutigen modernen Wortartenklassifikationen gehen bis in die Antike zurück: Bereits zu dieser Zeit hat Dionysius Thrax ein Schema mit acht Wortarten etabliert. Die darin auftretenden Wortarten sind Substantive, Verben, Adjektive, Artikel, Pronomen, Präpositionen, Adverbien und Konjunktionen. Diese Zahl wird wiederum in den unterschiedlichen Grammatikansätzen unserer Zeit variiert. So verwendet der generative Ansatz beispielsweise vier Wortarten – Bergenholtz/Schaeder (1977) verzeichnen dagegen ganze 51 verschiedene Wortarten und zusätzlich 5 Lexemklassen. Allein diese starken Schwankungen in der angenommenen Anzahl der Wortarten verdeutlichen die allgemeinen Schwierigkeiten bei der Abgrenzung der Wortarten in ihren Kriterien.
Das Zitat "Denn sie gliedern sich in Stämme wie die Menschen" aus Érik Orsennas "Die Grammatik ist ein sanftes Lied" leitet den Titel dieser Arbeit ein und markiert gleichzeitig eine Schnittstelle zwischen der Literaturwissenschaft und der Linguistik und speziell der Grammatik. Als metasprachliche Erzählung setzt sich Orsennas Erzählung literarisch mit der Sprache und ihrer Grammatik auseinander. In der vorliegenden Arbeit beschäftige ich mich vorrangig mit der Analyse der Kriterien zur Klassifikation von Wortarten und ihrer literarischen Darstellung und Ausgestaltung in Orsennas Text über die Wörter, die in Stämmen in der Stadt der Wörter zusammenleben und in einer Fabrik miteinander zu Sätzen verbunden werden können. Der Originaltext von Orsenna ist eine Erzählung in französischer Sprache. Die Übersetzerin Caroline Vollmann hat den Text an die Gegebenheiten und speziellen Phänomene der deutschen Sprache angepasst. Aus diesem Grund spreche ich in der Arbeit von Orsenna und Vollmann als Verfassern.
Da die Darstellung der Wortarten bei Orsenna und Vollmann primär durch Metaphern realisiert wird und den Wörtern als "Stämmen" in einer Stadt menschliche Eigenschaften zugewiesen werden, möchte ich besonders auf die Grundlagen der kognitiven Metapherntheorie von Lakoff und Johnson eingehen. Um eine möglichst wissenschaftlich fundierte Grundlage für die Analyse von Kriterien zur Wortartenklassifikation zu gewährleisten, habe ich drei Grammatiken als Vergleichsmedium für die spätere Analyse von Orsennas und Vollmanns Text ausgewählt. Dadurch gewinne ich sowohl eine syntaktisch als auch morphologisch und semantisch orientierte Perspektive auf den Untersuchungsgegenstand. Aus den Grammatiken von Hentschel/Weydt (2003), Helbig/Buscha (2005) und Boettcher (2009) soll im Verlauf der Arbeit ein Kriterienkatalog erstellt werden, der in einem weiteren Schritt auf die Analyse der Wortartenklassifikation des literarischen Textes angewendet werden kann.
Progress toward distinguishing clearly between generative and model-theoretic syntactic frameworks has not been smooth or swift, and the obfuscatory term 'constraint-based' has not helped. This paper reviews some elementary subregular formal language theory relevant to comparing description languages for model-theoretic grammars, generalizes the results to trees, and points out that HPSG linguists have maintained an unacknowledged and perhaps unintended allegiance to the idea of strictly local description: unbounded dependencies, in particular, are still being conceptualized in terms of plugging together local tree parts annotated with the SLASH feature. Adopting a description language with quantifiers holds out the prospect of eliminating the need for the SLASH feature. We need to ask whether that would be a good idea. Binding domain phenomena might tell us. More work of both descriptive and mathematical sorts is needed before the answer is clear.
This paper seeks to improve HPSG engineering through the design of more terse, readable and intuitive type signatures. It argues against the exclusive use of IS-A networks and, with reference to the English Resource Grammar, demonstrates that a collection of higher-order datatypes are already acutely in demand in contemporary HPSG design. Some default specification conventions to assist in maximizing the utility of higher-order type constructors are also discussed.
Was tun mit Flexionsklassen? : Deklinationsklassen und ihr Wandel im Deutschen und seinen Dialekten
(2008)
"Warum Flexionsklassen?" lautet ein synchron ausgerichteter Aufsatz von BERND WIESE (2000), an den dieser Beitrag aus diachroner und dialektaler Perspektive anschließt. Das hier zur Diskussion stehende Phänomen, nämlich die notorische Persistenz von Flexionsklasse (im Folgenden "FK") über Jahrhunderte, ja sogar Jahrtausende hinweg, dürfte noch eines der größten linguistischen Rätsel darstellen, die ihrer Lösung harren. HASPELMATH (2002, 115) eröffnet in seinem Band "Understanding Morphology" das Kapitel über "Inflectional paradigms" mit folgenden Worten: "Perhaps the most important challenge for an insightful description of inflection is the widespread existence of allomorphy in many languages."
Das vorliegende Arbeitspapier ist das Skript einer Vorlesung, die ich während des Wintersemesters 1986/87 am Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität zu Köln gehalten habe. […] Das Arbeitspapier gliedert sich in zwei Teile. Im ersten Teil, Kapitel 1 - 4, werden die bei der Untersuchung und Beschreibung einer Sprache auftretenden soziolinguistischen Probleme besprochen, während im zweiten Teil, Kapitel 5 - 11, behandelt wird, wie eine Grammatik geschrieben werden sollte. Es geht dabei also nicht um die grammatische Analyse sprachlicher Daten, sondern um die Darstellung einer Sprache, d.h. um die schriftstellerische Aufgabe des Linguisten, des Grammatikers im eigentlichen Sinn.
Some conceptual and empirical issues in linguistic theory : an illustration with pronominal clitics
(2001)
I would like to discuss a few general conceptual issues in linguistic theory, and see how they bear on some empirical facts about pronominal clitics. In particular, I would like to show that the conception of linguistic theory, justified on independent grounds, limits the class of issues and possible explanations for grammatical properties of specific linguistic expressions. I argue that this is not simply a consequence of a specific conception of grammar, conceived of as a system of principles and rules governing language, but has non-trivial empirical ramifications. Pronominal clitics are a good case study, since their grammatical properties bear on a wide range of facts falling under the purview of principles of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics.
Based on a Relevance Theory-informed view of language development, this paper argues that grammatical relations are construction-specific conventionalizations (grammaticalizations) of implicatures which arise out of repeated patterns of reference to particular types of referents. Once conventionalized, these structures function to constrain the hearer's identification of referents in discourse. As they are construction-specific, and hence language-specific, there is no category "subject" across languages; different languages will either show this type of grammaticalization or not, and if they do, may show it or not in different constructions. Any cross-linguistic use of terms such as "subject" (and "S", as in "SOV") should then be avoided.
This paper points out certain flaws in the semantics for lexical rule specifications developed in Meurers (2001). Under certain circumstances, certain words may not be licit inputs to a rule according to this semantics while one would expect them to be from inspecting the specification of the rule. The reasons for this are shown to be that whether properties of paths should be transferred from the input of a rule to its output is decided considering only the respective paths and their properties in isolation, ignoring the ‘non-local’ effects that transferring their properties can have. Furthermore, the semantics is insensitive to the possible shapes of inputs to the rule, which also makes it possible that inputs of certain shapes are unexpectedly not accepted. An alternative semantics is developed that does not suffer from these deficits.
In this paper, we report on a transformation scheme that turns a Categorial Grammar, more specifically, a Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG; see Baldridge, 2002) into a derivation- and meaning-preserving typed feature structure (TFS) grammar.
We describe the main idea which can be traced back at least to work by Karttunen (1986), Uszkoreit (1986), Bouma (1988), and Calder et al. (1988). We then show how a typed representation of complex categories can be extended by other constraints, such as modes, and indicate how the Lambda semantics of combinators is mapped into a TFS representation, using unification to perform perform alpha-conversion and beta-reduction (Barendregt, 1984). We also present first findings concerning runtime measurements, showing that the PET system, originally developed for the HPSG grammar framework, outperforms the OpenCCG parser by a factor of 8–10 in the time domain and a factor of 4–5 in the space domain.
1. There are two classes of theories of Universal Grammar: (1) Formalist theories, such as the widespread varieties of generative grammar. These theories start from the assumption that certain strings of linguistic forms are grammatical while other strings are ungrammatical. A grammar of this type produces grammatical strings and does not produce ungrammatical ones. All theories of this class fail in the same respect: they do not account for the meaning of the strings. (2) Semiotactic theories, which describe the meaning of a string in terms of the meanings of its constituent forms and their interrelations. The only elaborate formalized theory of this class presently available is the one advanced by C.L. Ebeling (Syntax and Semantics, Leiden: Brill, 1978). I shall discuss some of its mathematical properties here.
In this paper topic and focus effects at both left and right periphery are argued to be epiphenomena of general properties of tree growth. We incorporate Korean into this account as a prototypical verb-final language, and show how long- and short-distance scrambling form part of this general picture. Multiple long-distance scrambling effects emerge as a consequence of the feeding relationship between different forms of structural under-specification. We also show how the array of effects at the right periphery, in both verb-final and other language-types, can also be explained with the same concepts of tree growth. In particular the Right Roof Constraint, a well-known but little understood constraint, is an immediate consequence of compositionality constraints as articulated in this system.
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.
This study outlines the formation of the category of "modal verb" within the grammaticography of German from the beginnings in the 16th century up to its "canonization" in the first half of the 20th century, also showing certain parallels to the treatment of modal verbs in the grammaticography of Portuguese. It also describes the influence German grammaticography had on the formation of this category in the grammaticography of Portuguese.
This paper desribes four areas in which grammar engineers and theoretical linguists can interact. These include: using grammar engineering to confirm linguistic hypotheses; linguistic issues highlighted by grammar engineering; implementation capabilities guiding theoretical analyses; and insights into architecture issues. It is my hope that we will see more work in these areas in the future and more collaboration among grammar engineers and theoretical linguists. This is an area in which HPSG and LFG as a distinct advantage, given the strong communities and resources available.
This paper is concerned with developing Joan Bybee's proposals regarding the nature of grammatical meaning and synthesizing them with Paul Hopper's concept of grammar as emergent. The basic question is this: How much of grammar may be modeled in terms of grammaticalization? In contradistinction to Heine, Claudi & Hünnemeyer (1991), who propose a fairly broad and unconstrained framework for grammaticalization, we try to present a fairly specific and constrained theory of grammaticalization in order to get a more precise idea of the potential and the problems of this approach. Thus, while Heine et al. (1991:25) expand – without discussion – the traditional notion of grammaticalization to the clause level, and even include non-segmental structure (such as word order), we will here adhere to a strictly 'element-bound' view of grammaticalization: where no grammaticalized element exists, there is no grammaticalization. Despite this fairly restricted concept of grammaticalization, we will attempt to corroborate the claim that essential aspects of grammar may be understood and modeled in terms of grammaticalization. The approach is essentially theoretical (practical applications will, hopefully, follow soon) and many issues are just mentioned and not discussed in detail. The paper presupposes a familiarity with the basic facts of grammaticalization and it does not present any new facts.
This paper presents a left-branching constructionalist grammar design where the phrase structure tree does not correspond to the conventional constituent structure. The constituent structure is rather reflected by embeddings on a feature STACK. The design is compatible with incremental processing, as words are combined from left to right, one by one, and it gives a simple account of long distance dependencies, where the extracted element is assumed to be dominated by the extraction site. It is motivated by psycholinguistic findings.
This paper is concerned with anticausative verbs (or verb-forms), or shortly, anticausatives. [...] [C]ausative/non-causative pairs with a marked non-causative are quite frequent in the languages of the world. However, so far they have not received sufficient attention in general and typological linguistics, a fact which is also manifested in the absence of a generally recognized term for this phenomenon […]. This paper therefore deals with the most important properties of anticausatives (particularly semantic conditions on them), their relationship to other areas of grammar as well as their historical development in different languages. The grammatical domain of transitivity, valence and voice, where the anticausative belongs, takes up a central position in grammar and consequently the present discussion should be of considerable interest to general comparative (or typological) linguists.
The present study examines a particular kind of rule blockage – referred to below as an 'antistructure-preservation effect'. An anti-structure-preservation effect occurs if some language has a process which is preempted from going into effect if some sequence of sounds [XY] would occur on the surface, even though other words in the language have [XY] sequences (which are underlyingly /XY/). It will be argued below that anti-structure-preservation effects can be captured in Optimality Theory in terms of a general ranking involving FAITH and MARKEDNESS constraints and that individual languages invoke a specific instantiation of this ranking. A significant point made below is that while anti-structure-preservation effects can be handled straightforwardly in terms of constraint rankings they typically require ad hoc rule-specific conditions in rule-based approaches.
We present a constraint-based syntax-semantics interface for the construction of RMRS (Robust Minimal Recursion Semantics) representations from shallow grammars. The architecture is designed to allow modular interfaces to existing shallow grammars of various depth - ranging from chunk grammars to context-free stochastic grammars. We define modular semantics construction principles in a typed feature structure formalism that allow flexible adaptation to alternative grammars and different languages.
This paper describes some of our attempts in extending Zhong, a Chinese HPSG shared-grammar. New analyses for two Chinese specific phenomena, reduplication and the SUO-DE structure, are introduced. The analysis of reduplication uses lexical rules to capture both the syntactic and semantic properties (amplification in adjectives and diminishing in verbs). Words showing non-productive reduplication are entered in the lexicon, and the semantic relations will be captured in an external resource (the Chinese Open Wordnet). The SUO-DE structure constrains the meanings of relative clauses to a gapped-object interpretation.
This paper describes a number of verbal argument marking patterns found in the world's languages and provides HPSG analyses for them. In addition to commonly-occurring variations of morphosyntactic alignment (e.g. nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive), this paper also presents analyses of more complex phenomena, including ergativity splits, Austronesian-style focus-case systems, and direct-inverse systems and their interaction with case.
Simpler Syntax is an approach to grammar that calls for very restrictive limits on the notion of 'grammatical competence'. Specifically, it does not account for unacceptability judgments for sentences that are well-formed if they are fully licensed by the constructions of the language. SS leads us to seek accounts for such judgments in terms other than grammar per se, e.g., processing complexity, semantic or pragmatic well-formedness, discourse coherence, etc. I review several examples that suggest that the line that SS draws between competence on the one hand and performance and other mechanisms on the other is on the right track. Specifically, it does not account for unacceptability judgments for sentences that are well-formed if they are fully licensed by the constructions of the language. SS leads us to seek accounts for such judgments in terms other than grammar per se, e.g., processing complexity, semantic or pragmatic well-formedness, discourse coherence, etc. I review several examples that suggest that the line that SS draws between competence on the one hand and performance and other mechanisms on the other is on the right track.
Simplicity as a methodological orientation applies to linguistic theory just as to any other field of research: ‘Occam’s razor’ is the label for the basic heuristic maxim according to which an adequate analysis must ultimately be reduced to indispensible specifications. In this sense, conceptual economy has been a strict and stimulating guideline in the development of Generative Grammar from the very beginning. Halle’s (1959) argument discarding the level of taxonomic phonemics in order to unify two otherwise separate phonological processes is an early characteristic example; a more general notion is that of an evaluation metric introduced in Chomsky (1957, 1975), which relates the relative simplicity of alternative linguistic descriptions systematically to the quest for explanatory adequacy of the theory underlying the descriptions to be evaluated. Further proposals along these lines include the theory of markedness developed in Chomsky and Halle (1968), Kean (1975, 1981), and others, the notion of underspecification proposed e.g. in Archangeli (1984), Farkas (1990), the concept of default values and related notions. An important step promoting this general orientation was the idea of Principles and Parameters developed in Chomsky (1981, 1986), which reduced the notion of language particular rule systems to universal principles, subject merely to parametrization with restricted options, largely related to properties of particular lexical items. On this account, the notion of a simplicity metric is to be dispensed with, as competing analyses of relevant data are now supposed to be essentially excluded by the restrictive system of principles.