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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.
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.
The present work reports two experiments on brain electric correlates of cognitive and emotional functions. (1) Studying paranormal belief, 35-channel resting EEG (10 believers and 13 skeptics) was analyzed with "Low Resolution Electromagnetic Tomography" (LORETA) in seven frequency bands. LORETA gravity centers of all bands shifted to the left in believers vs. sceptics, and showed that believers had stronger left fronto-temporo-parietal activity than skeptics. Self-rating of affective attitude showed believers to be less negative than skeptics. The observed EEG lateralization agreed with the ‘valence hypothesis’ that posits predominant left hemispheric processing for positive emotions. (2) Studying emotions, positive and negative emotion words were presented to 21 subjects while "Event-Related Potentials" (ERPs) were recorded. During word presentation (450 ms), 13 microstates (steps of information processing) were identified. Three microstates showed different potential maps for positive vs. negative words; LORETA functional imaging showed stronger activity in microstate #4 (106-122 ms) for positive words right anterior, for negative words left central; in #6 (138-166 ms) for positive words left anterior, for negative words left posterior; in #7 (166-198 ms), for positive words right anterior, for negative words right central. In conclusion: during word processing, the extraction of emotion content starts as early as 106 ms after stimulus onset; the brain identifies emotion content repeatedly in three separate, brief microstate epochs; and, this processing of emotion content in the three microstates involves different brain mechanisms to represent the distinction positive vs. negative valence.
This paper examines the development of periphrastic constructions involving auxiliary "have" and "be" with a past participle in the history of English, on the basis of parsed electronic corpora. It is argued that the two constructions represented distinct syntactic and semantic structures: while the one with have developed into a true perfect in the course of Middle English, the one with be remained a stative resultative throughout its history. In this way, it is explained why the be construction was rarely or never used in a number of contexts, including past counterfactuals, iteratives, duratives, certain kinds of infinitives and various other utterance types that cannot be characterized as perfects of result. When the construction with have became a true perfect, it was used in such contexts, regardless of the identity of the main verb, leading to the appearance of have with verbs like come which had previously only taken be. Crucially, however, have was not spreading at the expense of be, as the be perfect had never been used in such contexts, but rather at the expense of the old simple past. At least until the end of the Early Modern English period, the shift in the relative frequency of have and be perfects is to be explained in terms of the expansion of the former into new contexts, while the latter remained stable. A formal analysis is proposed, taking as its starting point a comparison with German which shows that the older English be perfect indeed behaves more like the German stative passive than its haben and sein perfects.
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 I seek to account for the productive word-formation process resulting in the current proliferation of un-nouns, the semi-legitimate offspring of Humpty Dumpty´s un-birthday present (1871) and 7-Up´s commercial incarnation as The Un-Cola (1968), a construction that can be linked to the more well-established categories of un-adjectives and un-verbs, whose formation constraints we will also examine. Drawing on a large corpus of novel un-nouns I have assembled in collaboration with Beth Levin presented in the Appendices to this paper, I will invoke Rosch´s prototype semantics and Aristotle´s notion of PRIVATIVE opposites, defined in terms of a marked exception to a general class property, to generalize across the different categories of un-words. It will be argued that a given un-noun refers either to an element just outside a given category with whose members it shares a salient function (e.g. un-cola) or to a peripheral member of a given category (an unhotel is a hotel but not a good exemplar of the class-not a HOTEL hotel).
The retreat of BE as perfect auxiliary in the history of English is examined. Corpus data are presented showing that the initial advance of HAVE was most closely connected to a restriction against BE in past counterfactuals. Other factors which have been reported to favor the spread of HAVE are either dependent on the counterfactual effect, or significantly weaker in comparison. It is argued that the effect can be traced to the semantics of the BE perfect, which denoted resultativity rather than anteriority proper. Related data from other older Germanic and Romance languages are presented, and finally implications for existing theories of auxiliary selection stemming from the findings presented are discussed.
It has often been noticed that one syntactic argument position can be realized by elements which seem to realize different thematic roles. This is notably the case with the external argument position of verbs of change of state which licenses volitional agents, instruments or natural forces/causers, showing the generality and abstractness of the external argument relation. (1) a. John broke the window (Agent) b. The hammer broke the window (Instrument) c. The storm broke the window (Causer) In order to capture this generality, Van Valin & Wilkins (1996) and Ramchand (2003) among others have proposed that the thematic role of the external argument position is in fact underspecified. The relevant notion is that of an effector (in Van Valin & Wilkins) or of an abstract causer/initiator (in Ramchand). In this paper we argue against a total underspecification of the external argument relation. While we agree that (1b) does not instantiate an instrument theta role in subject position, we argue that a complete underspecification of the external theta-position is not feasible, but that two types of external theta roles have to be distinguished, Agents and Causers. Our arguments are based on languages where Agents and Causers show morpho-syntactic independence (section 2.1) and the behavior of instrument subjects in English, Dutch, German and Greek (section 2.2 and 3). We show that instrument subjects are either Agent or Causer like. In section (4) we give an analysis how arguments realizing these thematic notions are introduced into syntax.
Verbs, nouns and affixation
(2008)
What explains the rich patterns of deverbal nominalization? Why do some nouns have argument structure, while others do not? We seek a solution in which properties of deverbal nouns are composed from properties of verbs, properties of nouns, and properties of the morphemes that relate them. The theory of each plus the theory of howthey combine, should give the explanation. In exploring this, we investigate properties of two theories of nominalization. In one, the verb-like properties of deverbal nouns result from verbal syntactic structure (a “structural model”). See, for example, van Hout & Roeper 1998, Fu, Roeper and Borer 1993, 2001, to appear, Alexiadou 2001, to appear). According to the structural hypothesis, some nouns contain VPs and/or verbal functional layers. In the other theory, the verbal properties of deverbal nouns result from the event structure and argument structure of the DPs that they head. By “event structure” we mean a representation of the elements and structure of a linguistic event, not a representation of the world. We refer to this view as the “event model”. According to the event model hypothesis, all derived nouns are represented with the same syntactic structure, the difference lying in argument structure – which in turn is critically related to event structure, in the way sketched in Grimshaw (1990), Siloni (1997) among others. In pursuing these lines of analysis, and at least to some extent disentangling their properties, we reach the conclusion that, with respect to a core set of phenomena, the two theories are remarkably similar – specifically, they achieve success with the same problems, and must resort to the same stipulations to address the remaining issues that we discuss (although the stipulations are couched in different forms).
In many languages, a passive-like meaning may be obtained through a noncanonical passive construction. The get passive (1b) in English, the se faire passive (2b) in French and the kriegen passive (3b) in German represent typical manifestations. This squib focuses on the behavior of the get-passive in English and discusses a number of restrictions associated with it as well as the status of get.
In this paper we investigate Greek, an optional clitic doubling language not subject to Kaynes generalization (Jaeggli 1982), and we argue that in this language, doubled DPs are in A-positions. We propose that Greek clitics are formal features that move, permitting DPs in argument positions. This leads to a typology according to which there are two types of clitic/agreement languages -configurational and nonconfigurational ones-, depending upon whether clitics are instantiations of formal features or not.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2.1 introduces the basic classes of adjectives that constitute the factual core of the paper. Section 2.2 summarizes in greater detail the X° and the XP movement approaches to word order variation within the DP. Section 3 briefly discusses problems for both approaches. Sections 4.1, 5.1, and 5.2 draw from Alexiadou (2001) and contain a discussion of Greek DS and its relevance for a re-analysis of the word order variation in the Romance DP. Section 4.2 introduces refinements to Alexiadou & Wilder (1998) and Alexiadou (2001). Section 5.3. discusses certain issues that arise from the analysis of postnominal adjectives in Romance as involving raising of XPs. Section 6 discusses phenomena found in other languages, which at first sight seem similar to DS. However, I show that double definiteness in e.g. Hebrew, Scandinavian or other Balkan languages constitutes a different type of phenomenon from Greek DS, thus making a distinction between determiners that introduce CPs (Greek) and those that are merely morphological/agreement markers (Hebrew, Scandinavian, Albanian).
Class features as probes
(2008)
In this article, we adress (i) the form and (ii) the function on inflection class features in minimalist grammar. The empirical evidence comes from noun inflection systems involving fusional markers in German, Greek, and Russian. As for (i), we argue (based on instances of transparadigmatic syncretism) that class features are not privative; rather, class information must be decomposed into more abstract, binary features. Concerning (ii), we propose that class features qualify as the very device that brings about fusional infection: They are uninterpretable in syntax and actas probes on stems, with matching inflection markers as goels, and thus trigger morphological Agree operations that merge stem and inflection marker before syntax is reached.
The goal of this paper is to re-examine the status of the condition in (1) proposed in Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou (2001; henceforth A&A 2001), in view of recent developments in syntactic theory. (1) The subject-in-situ generalization (SSG) By Spell-Out, vP can contain only one argument with a structural Case feature. We argue that (1) is a more general condition than previously recognized, and that the domain of its application is parametrized. More specifically, based on a comparison between Indo-European (IE) and Khoisan languages, we argue that (1) supports an interpretation of the EPP as a general principle, and not as a property of T. Viewed this way, the SSG is a condition that forces dislocation of arguments as a consequence of a constraint on Case checking.
In this paper we compare the distribution of PPs introducing external arguments in nominalizations with PPs introducing external arguments in the verbal domain. We show that several mismatches exist between the behavior of PPs in nominalizations and PPs in the verbal domain. This leads us to suggest that while PPs in the verbal domain are licensed by functional structure alone, within the nominal domain, PPs can also be licensed via an interplay of the encyclopaedic meaning of the root involved and the properties of the preposition itself. This second mechanism kicks in in the absence of functional structure.
Structuring participles
(2008)
In this paper we discuss three types of adjectival participles in Greek, ending in -tos and –menos, and provide a further argument for the view that finer distinctions are necessary in the domain of participles (Kratzer 2001, Embick 2004). We further compare Greek stative participles to their German (and English) counterparts. We propose that a number of semantic as well as syntactic differences shown by these derive from differences in their respective morpho-syntactic composition.
In this paper we investigate the distribution of PPs related to external arguments (agent, causer, instrument, causing event) in Greek. We argue that their distribution supports an analysis, according to which agentive/instrument and causer PPs are licensed by distinct functional heads, respectively. We argue against a conceivable alternative analysis, which links agentivity and causation to the prepositions themselves. We furthermore identify a particular type of Voice head in Greek anticausative realised by non-active Voice morphology.
In the recent literature there is growing interest in the morpho-syntactic encoding of hierarchical effects. The paper investigates one domain where such effects are attested: ergative splits conditioned by person. This type of splits is then compared to hierarchical effects in direct-inverse alternations. On the basis of two case studies (Lummi instantiating an ergative split person language and Passamaquoddy an inverse language) we offer an account that makes no use of hierarchies as a primitive. We propose that the two language types differ as far as the location of person features is concerned. In inverse systems person features are located exclusively in T, while in ergative systems, they are located in T and a particular type of v. A consequence of our analysis is that Case checking in split and inverse systems is guided by the presence/absence of specific phi-features. This in turn provides evidence for a close connection between Case and phi-features, reminiscent of Chomsky’s (2000, 2001) Agree.
On the role of syntactic locality in morphological processes : the case of (Greek) derived nominals
(2008)
The paper is structured as follows. In section 2, I briefly summarize the facts on English and Greek nominalizations. In section 3, I discuss English nominal derivation in some detail. In section 4, I turn to the question of licensing of AS in nominals. In section 5, I turn to the issue of the optionality of licensing of AS in the nominal system.
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 deals with the variable position of adjectives in the Romanian DP. As all other Romance languages, Romanian allows for adjectives to appear in both prenominal and post-nominal position. In addition, however, Romanian has a third pattern: the so-called cel construction, in which the adjective in the post-nominal position is preceded by a determiner-like element, cel. This pattern is superficially similar to Determiner Spreading in Greek. In this paper we contrast the cel construction to Greek DS and discuss the similarities and differences between the two. We then present an analysis of cel as involving an appositive specification clause, building on de Vries (2002). We argue that the same structure is also involved in the context of nominal ellipsis, the second environment in which cel is found.
A commonly held view in the literature on Scrambling and Clitic Doubling is that both constructions are sensitive to Specificity. For this reason Sportiche (1992) proposes to unify the two, an approach which has become quite standard in the relevant literature ever since. However, the claim that clitic doubling is the counterpart of Germanic scrambling has never been substantiated. In this paper we present extensive evidence from Greek that Clitic Doubling has common formal properties with Germanic Scrambling/Object Shift. Our evidence consists mainly of binding facts observed when doubling takes place, which seem, at first sight, to be completely unexpected. On closer inspection, however, it turns out that these facts are strongly reminiscent of the effects showing up in Germanic scrambling. We propose that these properties can be derived under a theory of clitic constructions along the lines of Sportiche (1992) implemented into the framework of Chomsky (1995). Finally we suggest the that the crosslinguistic distribution of Scrambling as opposed to Clitic Doubling should be linked to a parameter relating to properties of Agr: Move/Merge XP vs. Move/Merge X° to Agr. We show that this parameter unifies the behaviour of subjects and objects within a language and across languages. The paper is organised as follows. In section 2 we present evidence from binding, interpretational and prosodic effects that doubling and scrambling display very similar properties. In section 3 we present Sportiches account and point out some problems for it. In section 4 we present our proposal.
Theories of cognition that are based on information processing and representation are reactive (Rosen, 1985) or backwards looking, not anticipatory. In a previous article (Thibault, 2005a), I looked at the reasons why humans and bonobos do not need an innate language faculty in order to be minded, languaging beings. The present article takes up some of the questions explored there, but, it asks, on the other hand, what sort of a minded agent has language and what kind of account of language and more broadly meaning do we need to explain minded, languaged agents and the activities they participate in? Following Rosen (1985), I also take up and further develop a point first raised in Thibault (2004a: 187) on language as an anticipatory system, rather than a reactively ‘representational’ one (see also Bickhard, 2005).
The paper focuses on business negotiation in settings in which participants from different mothertongue backgrounds choose French, English andfor German as one of their languages of communication. A general scheme of the action-pattem of buying and selling will be sketched out which allows us to analyze specific Courses of verbal actions according ta their communicative functions within the negotiation process. In particular, the discourse of business communication is to be specified as a decision making process on the part of the buyer which is executed in a step-by-step order, and which is Open to the application of a bundle of the seller's strategies, tactics, and communicative techniques. In international negotiations, effects of unobserved miscommunication are, among others, far-stretched communicative circles, prolongation of negotiation time, non-functional explanations and several other repetitive structures. 1. Languages of trade and commerce - languages of communication 2. Communication in a Buy-Sell-Context is patterned 2.1. Entering the Pattern 2.2. The Main Phase 2.3. The Bidding Phase 2.4. The Specifc Conditions 2.5. Negotiating the Contract 3. The Central Point 3.1. The Buyer's Decision-Making Process 3.2 Decision-Making and Role-Playing 3.3. Intercultural Difference of the Decision-Making Process 4. Bridging the Buyer's Gap of Knowledge 5. The Language of Trade and Commerce 6. The Needs of Further Research: Data References
What are the similarities and differences in the loss of grammatical systems across individual languages? To answer this question, I examine structural consequences of language attrition and the correspondences between language-particular and cross-linguistic phenomena under circumstances of severe attrition. However, the very formulation of this approach, involving "severe attrition", already warrants some clarification, It leads to the formuIation of two collateral questions. First, how can the level of language attrition be quantified? Second, which structural features are diagnostic of the decline of grammar? I present data on structural change in six attrited languages as compared to non-attrited control languages and demonstrate that there is significant parallelism in structural change across languages. Next, I show a correlation between levels of grammatical and lexical loss and introduce a simple test allowing us to measure the level of attrition.
There is an inexhaustible stream of theoretical work on aspect. More than 20 major books of a gelteral nature have come out during the past few years, not to mention the vast amount of shorter articles. The theoretical proposals found in these works are often radically different. What is the state of the art in this highly controversial area? To what extent can the "ordinary working linguist" profit from the flood of theoretical proposals? This paper started out as a review article on five recent books on aspect. These reviews are incorporated here into a general assessment of contemporary aspect theories. We will classify different approaches to aspect and try to sort out their theoretical primitives. The paper concludes wich a brief summary pointing out the most urgent desiderata for a typologically adequate approach to aspect.
With one group generally constituting the autochthonous host - representing the core population in the centre - immigrant groups tend to reside in separate ethnic wards and even work in wards/quartiers identified with their ethno-specific crafts and trades - and often named after them. The socio-lingustic survey will therefore use available and new maps and ethno-linguistic statistics: For the former, the urban surveys by the Max Lock Company of north-eastern Nigeria have been of great help, but have to be updated ; for the latter, various censuses had to be supplemented by more recent information . With ethno-linguistic wards constituting enclaves which can only interact through a language or languages in common, we can apply the general model of the triglottic configuration by positing x territorial and y immigrant, ethnic languages of solidarity; one general urban community language or lingua franca of interaction; and the official language of authority and administration. This language of authority was formerly a local aristolect (Kanuri or Fulfulde), but is now mostly an exolect - English or French. This short presentation concerns ongoing work in urban socio-lingustics developed in Maiduguri over some 15 years.
This paper argues that short (clause-internal) scrambling to a pre-subject position has A properties in Japanese but A'-properties in German, while long scrambling (scrambling across sentence boundaries) from finite clauses, which is possible in Japanese but not in German, has A'-properties throughout. It is shown that these differences between German and Japanese can be traced back to parametric variation of phrase structure and the parameterized properties of functional heads. Due to the properties of Agreement, sentences in Japanese may contain multiple (Agro- and Agrs-) specifiers whereas German does not allow for this. In Japanese, a scrambled element may be located in a Spec AgrP, i.e. an A- or L-related position, whereas scrambled NPs in German can only appear in an AgrP-adjoined (broadly-L-related) position, which only has A'-properties. Given our assumption that successive cyclic adjunction is generally impossible, elements in German may not be long scrambled because a scrambled element that is moved to an adjunction site inside an embedded clause may not move further. In Japanese, long distance scrambling out of finite CPs is possible since scrambling may proceed in a successive cyclic manner via embedded Spec- (AgrP) positions. Our analysis of the differences between German and Japanese scrambling provides us with an account of further contrasts between the two languages such as the existence of surprising asymmetries between German and Japanese remnant-movement phenomena, and the fact that unlike German, Japanese freely allows wh-scrambling. Investigation of the properties of Japanese wh-movement also leads us to the formulation of the "Wh-cluster Hypothesis", which implies that Japanese is an LF multiple wh-fronting language.
In this paper I discuss the properties of particle verbs in light of a proposal about syntactic projection. In section 2 I suggest that projection involves functional structure in two important ways: (i) only functional phrases can be complements, and (ii) lexical heads that take complements and project must be inflected. In section 3, I show that the structure of particle verbs is not uniform with respect to (i) and (ii). On the one hand, a particle always combines with an inflected verb; in this respect, particle verbs look like verb-complement constructions. On the other hand, the particle is not a functional phrase and therefore is not a proper complement, which makes the combination of the particle and the verb look more like a morphologically complex verb. I argue that syntactic rules can in fact interpret the node dominating the particle and the verb as a projection and as a complex head. In section 4, I show that many of the characteristic properties of particle verbs in the Germanic languages follow from the fact that they are structural hybrids.
Expletives as features
(2000)
Expletives have always been a central topic of theoretical debate and subject to different analyses within the different stages of the Principles and Parameter theory (see Chomsky 1981, 1986, 1995; Lasnik 1992, 1995; Frampton and Gutman 1997; among others). However, most analyses center on the question how to explain the behavior of expletives in A-chains (such as there in English or Þad in Icelandic). No account relates wh-expletives (as one finds them in so-called partial wh-movement constructions in languages such as Hungarian, Romani, and German) to expletives in Achains. In this paper, I argue that the framework of the Minimalist Program opens up the possibility of accounting for expletive-associate relations in A-/A'-chains in a unified manner. The main idea of the unitary analysis is that an expletive is an overtly realized feature bundle that is (sub)extracted from its associate DP. There in an expletive-associate chain is a moved D-feature which orginates inside the associate DP. Similarily, in A'-chains, the whexpletive originates as a focus-/wh-feature in the wh-phrase with which it is associated. This analysis provides evidence for the feature-checking theory in Chomsky (1995). The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 contains the discussion of expletive there. In section 3 I suggest an analysis for whexpletives, and I also explore whether this analysis can be extended to relations between X°-categories such as auxiliary and participle complexes.
In this paper I show that Clitic Climbing (CC) in Spanish and Long Scrambling (LS) in German (and Polish) are (im-)possible out of the same environments. For an explanation of this fact I propose a feature-oriented analysis of incorporation phenomena. The idea is that restructuring is a phenomenon of syntactic incorporation. In German and Polish, Agro incorporates covertly into the matrix clause and licenses LS out of the infinitival into the matrix clause. Similarily the clitic in Spanish, which is analysed as an Agro-head, incorporates into the matrix clause. I argue that this movement is necessary for reasons of feature-checking, i. e. for checking of an [+R]- or Restructuring-feature. In section 2 I discuss several differences between CC and LS. For example, the proposed analysis correctly predicts that clitics in contrast to scrambled phrases are subject to several serialization restrictions. Throughout the paper I use the term restructuring only in a descriptive sense, in order to describe the phenomenon in question.
Plural semantics for natural language understanding : a computational proof-theoretic approach
(2005)
The semantics of natural language plurals poses a number of intricate problems – both from a formal and a computational perspective. In this thesis I investigate problems of representing, disambiguating and reasoning with plurals from a computational perspective. The work defines a computationally suitable representation for important plural constructions, proposes a tractable resolution algorithm for semantic plural ambiguities, and integrates an automatic reasoning component for plurals. My solution combines insights from formal semantics, computational linguistics and automated theorem proving and is based on the following main ideas. Whereas many existing approaches to plural semantics work on a model-theoretic basis using higher-order representation languages I propose a proof-theoretic approach to plural semantics based on a flat firstorder semantic representation language thus showing that a trade-off between expressive power and logical tractability can be found. The problem of automatic disambiguation of plurals is tackled by a deliberate decision to drastically reduce recourse to contextual knowledge for disambiguation but rely instead on structurally available and thus computationally manageable information. A further central aspect of the solution lies in carefully drawing the borderline between real ambiguity and mere indeterminacy in the interpretation of plural noun phrases. As a practical result of my computational proof-theoretic approach to plural semantics I can use my methods to perform automated reasoning with plurals by applying advanced firstorder theorem provers and model-generators available off-the shelf. The results are prototypically implemented within the two logic-oriented natural language understanding applications DRoPs and Attempto. DRoPs provides an automatic plural disambiguation component for uncontrolled natural language whereas Attempto works with a constructive disambiguation strategy for controlled natural language. Both systems provide tools for the automated analysis of technical texts allowing users for example to automatically detect inconsistencies, to perform question answering, to check whether a conjecture follows from a text or to find equivalences and redundancies.
The volume is a collection of papers given at the conference “sub8 -- Sinn und Bedeutung”, the eighth annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Semantik, held at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt (Germany) in September 2003. During this conference, experts presented and discussed various aspects of semantics. The very different topics included in this book provide insight into fields of ongoing Semantics research.
Dutch nominalised infinitives have been notoriously difficult to analyse, partly because they seem to show mixed verbal and nominal properties interspersed across the structure. In this paper, it is argued that at least two types of such infinitives should be distinguished, one which contains a high level of verbal functional structure, and one that differs at least in not projecting TP. On the basis of this distinction it is possible to show that Dutch nominalised infinitives have much more predictable properties than could previously be identified. They show evidence of conforming to a model of analysing mixed categories in terms of category switch within the constituent. In order to account for the seemingly interspersed nature of nominal and verbal properties in Dutch nominalised infinitives I propose that Dutch of-phrases (van-phrases) may merge inside the VP, provided they have access to nominal functional structure for feature checking. I will show that if D° is filled by a special type of non-deictic demonstratives van-phrases may even occur in SpecDP.