CLiFF Notes: Research In Natural Language Processing at the University of Pennsylvania

CLIFF is the Computational Linguists\u27 Feedback Forum. We are a group of students and faculty who gather once a week to hear a presentation and discuss work currently in progress. The \u27feedback\u27 in the group\u27s name is important: we are interested in sharing ideas, in discussing ongoing research, and in bringing together work done by the students and faculty in Computer Science and other departments. However, there are only so many presentations which we can have in a year. We felt that it would be beneficial to have a report which would have, in one place, short descriptions of the work in Natural Language Processing at the University of Pennsylvania. This report then, is a collection of abstracts from both faculty and graduate students, in Computer Science, Psychology and Linguistics. We want to stress the close ties between these groups, as one of the things that we pride ourselves on here at Penn is the communication among different departments and the inter-departmental work. Rather than try to summarize the varied work currently underway at Penn, we suggest reading the abstracts to see how the students and faculty themselves describe their work. The report illustrates the diversity of interests among the researchers here, as well as explaining the areas of common interest. In addition, since it was our intent to put together a document that would be useful both inside and outside of the university, we hope that this report will explain to everyone some of what we are about

The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study

Carminati MN, Knoeferle P. The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study. Presented at the Architectures and Mechanisms of Language and Processing (AMLaP), Riva del Garda, Italy

Typological parameters of genericity

Different languages employ different morphosyntactic devices for expressing genericity. And, of course, they also make use of different morphosyntactic and semantic or pragmatic cues which may contribute to the interpretation of a sentence as generic rather than episodic. [...] We will advance the strong hypo thesis that it is a fundamental property of lexical elements in natural language that they are neutral with respect to different modes of reference or non-reference. That is, we reject the idea that a certain use of a lexical element, e.g. a use which allows reference to particular spatio-temporally bounded objects in the world, should be linguistically prior to all other possible uses, e.g. to generic and non-specific uses. From this it follows that we do not consider generic uses as derived from non-generic uses as it is occasionally assumed in the literature. Rather, we regard these two possibilities of use as equivalent alternative uses of lexical elements. The typological differences to be noted therefore concern the formal and semantic relationship of generic and non-generic uses to each other; they do not pertain to the question of whether lexical elements are predetermined for one of these two uses. Even supposing we found a language where generic uses are always zero-marked and identical to lexical sterns, we would still not assume that lexical elements in this language primarily have a generic use from which the non-generic uses are derived. (Incidentally, none of the languages examined, not even Vietnamese, meets this criterion.

Chinese DE constructions in secondary predication: Historical and typological perspectives

This dissertation investigates the history of Chinese DE [tə] constructions in light of the typology of secondary predication. A secondary predicate, such as hot in He drank the tea hot, is a predicate that provides subsidiary information to a substructure (the participant tea) of the more salient primary event (drank). Mandarin DE features in two strategies: (i) a DE-marked primary event elaborated by a predicate following it, and (ii) a DE-marked secondary predicate preposed to the primary predicate. Focusing on Late Medieval Chinese (7th to mid-13th c.), the study examines the evolution of the DE-marked strategies from three distinctive constructions: resultative [V DE1 VP] by DE1 (得), nominal modification by DE2 (底/的), and secondary predication by DE3 (地). The first theme concerns the interactions between DE2-marked nominalization and DE3-marked secondary predicate constructions. Results show that DE2 and DE3 developed from opposite poles of the attribution vs. predication continuum, overlapping in categories intermediate between prototypical restrictive modification and secondary predication. Their distinctive information-packaging functions are consistently mapped to different construals of a property’s time-stability, which are reflected in their collocational preferences. The second theme of the study deals with the merger of DE1 and DE2 constructions and the creation of the [V DE Pred] topic-comment schema, where [V DE] represents an event as the topic, and Pred makes an assertion about a substructure of V. The discussion focuses on the structural and semantic changes of the [V DE1 VP] construction that facilitate its alignment with the DE2-marked topic-comment construction. The development of DE constructions mirrors semantic shifts between temporally anterior vs. simultaneous relations and conceptual fluidity between event- vs. participant-orientation, parameters that feature in the encoding of secondary predication crosslinguistically (Verkerk 2009, Himmelmann and Schultze-Berndt 2005, van der Auwera and Malchukov 2005, Loeb-Diehl 2005). The findings also suggest a reevaluation of the typology. Notably, semantic orientation is not crucial to whether a semantic relation is encoded by a DE construction, or which DE construction is selected. Instead, it is information-packaging functions, construals of time-stability, and iconic principles that play a dominant role

Dynamic syntax account of argument realization in mandarin

Natural languages are systems of forms and meanings; language understanding and language production are processes of establishing mappings between linguistic forms and meanings. The principles and rules governing the mapping between semantic roles and syntactic positions have long been a fundamental topic in contemporary linguistics. Such a mapping is usually called argument realization, argument mapping or argument linking. On the basis of the previous language specific and cross linguistic researches on this issue, this thesis picks out two tasks. One is the empirical task of the investigating the principles and rules governing the mapping between semantic roles and linear syntactic positions in Mandarin Chinese. The other is the theoretical task of the exploration of how argument realization principles and rules play their roles in the live temporal linear comprehension and production of sentences. On the empirical side, this thesis mainly investigates the phenomenon of argument alternation, that is, the non-one-to-one mapping between semantic roles and syntactic forms (linear positions) in Mandarin and argues that alternative syntactic forms in which semantic roles are realized are not arbitrary but semantically motivated. More specifically, it proposes that alternative patterns of argument realization encode different types of events. This thesis concentrates on three major cases of argument alternation. The first is the argument alternation in the resultative verb construction (RVC) that involves two verbs and expresses a complex event consisting of a first (activity) subevent and a second (resultative) subevent. The arguments of the two verbs are mapped onto the subject and the object alternatively and the argument sharing between the verbs results from syntactically constrained pragmatic inference. The argument realization principles and rules of RVC are used to account for two puzzling cases of argument alternation in Mandarin, i.e. the locative alternation and the agentive alternation. This account of inverse argument realizations has the implication that argument alternations are semantically motivated rather than the result of arbitrary syntactic operation. To facilitate the discussion of how different semantic representations arise in different process of comprehension, I adopt Dynamic Syntax (Kempson et al 2001; Cann et al 2005) which provides a package of working hypotheses about human language grammars and the formal tools for representing how grammars work. It is hypothesized in Dynamic Syntax that the grammar of a natural language is a set of constraints over language comprehension; sentences are understood and produced in context through left-to-right word-by-word parsing processes. Parsing processes are driven by the axiomatic requirement of establishing complete logical forms that can be enriched to full propositions. Such processes have the characteristic of semantic underspecification, including underspecified semantic relationships and underspecified semantic contents; semantic underspecification can and must be updated through non-demonstrative inference implemented in linguistic and nonlinguistic contexts. Using the framework I hypothesize that in RVC constructions the first verb provides a condition on the sort of event expressed by the second verb, encoding this in terms of event semantics. It is argued that only the argument of the latter are required to be realized in the string (or be contextually strongly determined) through pro-drop. Those of the activity predicate, however, are inferred through pragmatic means given the arguments that are realized. This directly accounts for the attested patterns of argument realization in RVC and explain the apparent gaps. This analysis is extended to locative and agentive inversion constructions where it is hypothesized that there is null resultative predicate that explains why a non-agent can be realized as subject, even in the presence of a more agentive noun phrase in the string. This thesis thus maintains the hypothesis that the mapping between semantic roles and syntactic positions is direct though not one-to-one. Although there is no one-toone mapping between syntactic forms, the argument mapping rules can ensure efficient comprehension and production when they are applied in context. This thesis provides a uniform account of different argument alternation phenomena that have been seen as unrelated to each other in the literature. The successful uniform explanation of the ‘unrelated’ phenomena of argument alternation can be generalized as a methodology: a thorough semantic analysis of various alternative syntactic constructions can reveal the subtle semantic differences between them and the importance of these subtle semantic difference for a theorectic account of argumenty alternation has been largely underestimated in the literature. This constitutes the foundation of a uniform explanation of syntactic phenomena that seem to be unrelated to each other. This success lights the hope of seeking semantics-based uniform accounts of other different kinds of syntactic phenomena in a single language and across languages in future research

Formal approaches to number in Slavic and beyond (Volume 5)

The goal of this collective monograph is to explore the relationship between the cognitive notion of number and various grammatical devices expressing this concept in natural language with a special focus on Slavic. The book aims at investigating different morphosyntactic and semantic categories including plurality and number-marking, individuation and countability, cumulativity, distributivity and collectivity, numerals, numeral modifiers and classifiers, as well as other quantifiers. It gathers 19 contributions tackling the main themes from different theoretical and methodological perspectives in order to contribute to our understanding of cross-linguistic patterns both in Slavic and non-Slavic languages