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This paper addresses the problem ofconstraints for relative quantifier sope, in partiular in inverse linking readings wherecertain scope orders are exluded. We show how to account for such restrictions in the Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) framework by adopting a notion offlexible composition. In the semantics we use for TAG we introduce quantifier sets that group quantifiers that are "glued" together in the sense that no other quantifieran scopally intervene between them. Theflexible composition approach allows us to obtain the desired quantifier sets and thereby the desiredconstraints for quantifier sope.
TT-MCTAG lets one abstract away from the relative order of co-complements in the final derived tree, which is more appropriate than classic TAG when dealing with flexible word order in German. In this paper, we present the analyses for sentential complements, i.e., wh-extraction, thatcomplementation and bridging, and we work out the crucial differences between these and respective accounts in XTAG (for English) and V-TAG (for German).
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.
Developing linguistic resources, in particular grammars, is known to be a complex task in itself, because of (amongst others) redundancy and consistency issues. Furthermore some languages can reveal themselves hard to describe because of specific characteristics, e.g. the free word order in German. In this context, we present (i) a framework allowing to describe tree-based grammars, and (ii) an actual fragment of a core multicomponent tree-adjoining grammar with tree tuples (TT-MCTAG) for German developed using this framework. This framework combines a metagrammar compiler and a parser based on range concatenation grammar (RCG) to respectively check the consistency and the correction of the grammar. The German grammar being developed within this framework already deals with a wide range of scrambling and extraction phenomena.
Cet article étudie la relation entre les grammaires darbres adjoints à composantes multiples avec tuples darbres (TT-MCTAG), un formalisme utilisé en linguistique informatique, et les grammaires à concaténation dintervalles (RCG). Les RCGs sont connues pour décrire exactement la classe PTIME, il a en outre été démontré que les RCGs « simples » sont même équivalentes aux systèmes de réécriture hors-contextes linéaires (LCFRS), en dautres termes, elles sont légèrement sensibles au contexte. TT-MCTAG a été proposé pour modéliser les langages à ordre des mots libre. En général ces langages sont NP-complets. Dans cet article, nous définissons une contrainte additionnelle sur les dérivations autorisées par le formalisme TT-MCTAG. Nous montrons ensuite comment cette forme restreinte de TT-MCTAG peut être convertie en une RCG simple équivalente. Le résultat est intéressant pour des raisons théoriques (puisqu’il montre que la forme restreinte de TT-MCTAG est légèrement sensible au contexte), mais également pour des raisons pratiques (la transformation proposée ici a été utilisée pour implanter un analyseur pour TT-MCTAG).
This paper compares two approaches to computational semantics, namely semantic unification in Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars (LTAG) and Lexical Resource Semantics (LRS) in HPSG. There are striking similarities between the frameworks that make them comparable in many respects. We will exemplify the differences and similarities by looking at several phenomena. We will show, first of all, that many intuitions about the mechanisms of semantic computations can be implemented in similar ways in both frameworks. Secondly, we will identify some aspects in which the frameworks intrinsically differ due to more general differences between the approaches to formal grammar adopted by LTAG and HPSG.
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.
In this paper we present a parsing architecture that allows processing of different mildly context-sensitive formalisms, in particular Tree-Adjoining Grammar (TAG), Multi-Component Tree-Adjoining Grammar with Tree Tuples (TT-MCTAG) and simple Range Concatenation Grammar (RCG). Furthermore, for tree-based grammars, the parser computes not only syntactic analyses but also the corresponding semantic representations.
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.
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.