Scrambling in german and the non-locality of local TDGs

Existing analyses of German scrambling phenomena within TAG-related formalisms all use non-local variants of TAG. However, there are good reasons to prefer local grammars, in particular with respect to the use of the derivation structure for semantics. Therefore this paper proposes to use local TDGs, a TAG-variant generating tree descriptions that shows a local derivation structure. However the construction of minimal trees for the derived tree descriptions is not subject to any locality constraint. This provides just the amount of non-locality needed for an adequate analysis of scrambling. To illustrate this a local TDG for some German scrambling data is presented

Tree-local MCTAG with shared nodes : an analysis of word order variation in German and Korean

Tree Adjoining Grammars (TAG) are known not to be powerful enough to deal with scrambling in free word order languages. The TAG-variants proposed so far in order to account for scrambling are not entirely satisfying. Therefore, an alternative extension of TAG is introduced based on the notion of node sharing. Considering data from German and Korean, it is shown that this TAG-extension can adequately analyse scrambling data, also in combination with extraposition and topicalization.Les Grammaires dArbres Adjoints (TAG) sont connues pour ne pas etre assez puissantes pour traiter le brouillage darguments dans des langues à ordre desmots libre. Les variantes TAG proposées jusqu´à maintenant pour expliquer le brouillage ne sont pas entièrement satisfaisantes. Nous présentons ici une extension alternative de TAG, basée sur la notion du partage de noeuds. En considerant des données de lallemand et du coréen, on montre que cette extension de TAG peut en juste proportion analyser des données de brouillage d’arguments, également en combinaison avec lextraposition et la topicalisation

A Processing Model for Free Word Order Languages

Like many verb-final languages, Germn displays considerable word-order freedom: there is no syntactic constraint on the ordering of the nominal arguments of a verb, as long as the verb remains in final position. This effect is referred to as ``scrambling'', and is interpreted in transformational frameworks as leftward movement of the arguments. Furthermore, arguments from an embedded clause may move out of their clause; this effect is referred to as ``long-distance scrambling''. While scrambling has recently received considerable attention in the syntactic literature, the status of long-distance scrambling has only rarely been addressed. The reason for this is the problematic status of the data: not only is long-distance scrambling highly dependent on pragmatic context, it also is strongly subject to degradation due to processing constraints. As in the case of center-embedding, it is not immediately clear whether to assume that observed unacceptability of highly complex sentences is due to grammatical restrictions, or whether we should assume that the competence grammar does not place any restrictions on scrambling (and that, therefore, all such sentences are in fact grammatical), and the unacceptability of some (or most) of the grammatically possible word orders is due to processing limitations. In this paper, we will argue for the second view by presenting a processing model for German.Comment: 23 pages, uuencoded compressed ps file. In {\em Perspectives on Sentence Processing}, C. Clifton, Jr., L. Frazier and K. Rayner, editors. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 199

A generation-oriented workbench for performance grammar: Capturing linear order variability in German and Dutch

We describe a generation-oriented workbench for the Performance Grammar (PG) formalism, highlighting the treatment of certain word order and movement constraints in Dutch and German. PG enables a simple and uniform treatment of a heterogeneous collection of linear order phenomena in the domain of verb constructions (variably known as Cross-serial Dependencies, Verb Raising, Clause Union, Extraposition, Third Construction, Particle Hopping, etc.). The central data structures enabling this feature are clausal “topologies”: one-dimensional arrays associated with clauses, whose cells (“slots”) provide landing sites for the constituents of the clause. Movement operations are enabled by unification of lateral slots of topologies at adjacent levels of the clause hierarchy. The PGW generator assists the grammar developer in testing whether the implemented syntactic knowledge allows all and only the well-formed permutations of constituents

A generation-oriented workbench for performance grammar: Capturing linear order variability in German and Dutch

We describe a generation-oriented workbench for the Performance Grammar (PG) formalism, highlighting the treatment of certain word order and movement constraints in Dutch and German. PG enables a simple and uniform treatment of a heterogeneous collection of linear order phenomena in the domain of verb constructions (variably known as Cross-serial Dependencies, Verb Raising, Clause Union, Extraposition, Third Construction, Particle Hopping, etc.). The central data structures enabling this feature are clausal “topologies”: one-dimensional arrays associated with clauses, whose cells (“slots”) provide landing sites for the constituents of the clause. Movement operations are enabled by unification of lateral slots of topologies at adjacent levels of the clause hierarchy. The PGW generator assists the grammar developer in testing whether the implemented syntactic knowledge allows all and only the well-formed permutations of constituents

Lexicalization and Grammar Development

In this paper we present a fully lexicalized grammar formalism as a particularly attractive framework for the specification of natural language grammars. We discuss in detail Feature-based, Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars (FB-LTAGs), a representative of the class of lexicalized grammars. We illustrate the advantages of lexicalized grammars in various contexts of natural language processing, ranging from wide-coverage grammar development to parsing and machine translation. We also present a method for compact and efficient representation of lexicalized trees.Comment: ps file. English w/ German abstract. 10 page

Constraint-Based Categorial Grammar

We propose a generalization of Categorial Grammar in which lexical categories are defined by means of recursive constraints. In particular, the introduction of relational constraints allows one to capture the effects of (recursive) lexical rules in a computationally attractive manner. We illustrate the linguistic merits of the new approach by showing how it accounts for the syntax of Dutch cross-serial dependencies and the position and scope of adjuncts in such constructions. Delayed evaluation is used to process grammars containing recursive constraints.Comment: 8 pages, LaTe

Tractability issues in extraposition grammar

Extraposition Grammar (XG) was introduced in [Per81] as a grammar formalism whose increase in recognizing power over context free grammars is limited to mechanisms for adequate description of structural phenomena occurring in natural language. This paper proposes versions of XG whose fixed recognition problems are in deterministic polynomial and exponential time; furthermore it is shown that the unrestricted XG defined in the original work [Per81] describe any recursively enumerable language

Coordination in Tree Adjoining Grammars: Formalization and Implementation

In this paper we show that an account for coordination can be constructed using the derivation structures in a lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG). We present a notion of derivation in LTAGs that preserves the notion of fixed constituency in the LTAG lexicon while providing the flexibility needed for coordination phenomena. We also discuss the construction of a practical parser for LTAGs that can handle coordination including cases of non-constituent coordination.Comment: 6 pages, 16 Postscript figures, uses colap.sty. To appear in the proceedings of COLING 199