Degraded acceptability and markedness in syntax, and the stochastic interpretation of optimality theory

The argument that I tried to elaborate on in this paper is that the conceptual problem behind the traditional competence/performance distinction does not go away, even if we abandon its original Chomskyan formulation. It returns as the question about the relation between the model of the grammar and the results of empirical investigations – the question of empirical verification The theoretical concept of markedness is argued to be an ideal correlate of gradience. Optimality Theory, being based on markedness, is a promising framework for the task of bridging the gap between model and empirical world. However, this task not only requires a model of grammar, but also a theory of the methods that are chosen in empirical investigations and how their results are interpreted, and a theory of how to derive predictions for these particular empirical investigations from the model. Stochastic Optimality Theory is one possible formulation of a proposal that derives empirical predictions from an OT model. However, I hope to have shown that it is not enough to take frequency distributions and relative acceptabilities at face value, and simply construe some Stochastic OT model that fits the facts. These facts first of all need to be interpreted, and those factors that the grammar has to account for must be sorted out from those about which grammar should have nothing to say. This task, to my mind, is more complicated than the picture that a simplistic application of (not only) Stochastic OT might draw

Optimality Theory as a Framework for Lexical Acquisition

This paper re-investigates a lexical acquisition system initially developed for French.We show that, interestingly, the architecture of the system reproduces and implements the main components of Optimality Theory. However, we formulate the hypothesis that some of its limitations are mainly due to a poor representation of the constraints used. Finally, we show how a better representation of the constraints used would yield better results

Numbat: Abolishing Privileges when Licensing New Constituents in Constraint-Oriented Parsing

International audienceThe constraint-oriented approaches to language processing step back from the generative theory and make it possible, in theory, to deal with all types of linguistic relationships (e.g. dependency, linear precedence or immediate dominance) with the same importance when parsing an input utterance. Yet in practice, all implemented constraint-oriented parsing strategies still need to discriminate between "important" and "not-so-important" types of relations during the parsing process.In this paper we introduce a new constraint-oriented parsing strategy based on Property Grammars, which overcomes this drawback and grants the same importance to all types of relations

Categoricity and Gradience in the Dative Alternation in Moroccan Arabic

Previous research has shown that dative verbs in Moroccan Arabic cannot be freely admitted in the double object construction when their recipient argument is realized as a full lexical Noun Phrase (Zeddari, 2008). However, a closer look reveals that native speakers’ judgments seem to be gradient with verbs of giving, of which “Àtˤa” (give) is prototypical, resulting in intermediate well-formedness. Other verb classes, not encoding the transfer of possession, however, still exhibit the categoricity effect reported in the literature. In this paper, both gradient and categorical aspects are formalized through constraint interaction within Stochastic Optimality Thoery (Prince and Smolensky, 1993; Boersma, 1998)

Fuzzy Grammaticality Models: A Tool for Web Language Analysis

AbstractIn this paper, we highlight the need to propose formal models that consider grammaticality as a gradient property instead of the categorical view of grammaticality defended in theoretical linguistics. Given that deviations from the norm are inherent to the spontaneous use of language, linguistic analysis tools should account for different levels of grammaticality. Fuzzy grammaticality models may be a way to solve the problem that the so-called “noisy text” poses to parsing mechanisms used in Web language analysis–especially social networks language

Acceptability Prediction by Means of Grammaticality Quantification

International audienceWe propose in this paper a method for quantifying sentence grammaticality. The approach based on Property Grammars, a constraint-based syntactic formalism, makes it possible to evaluate a grammaticality index for any kind of sentence, including ill-formed ones. We compare on a sample of sentences the grammaticality indices obtained from PG formalism and the acceptability judgements measured by means of a psycholinguistic analysis. The results show that the derived grammaticality index is a fairly good tracer of acceptability scores

Linguistic Judgments As Evidence

An overview of debates surrounding the use of meta-linguistic judgments in linguistics, including recent relevant empirical results

Animacy in early New Zealand english

The literature suggests that animacy effects in present-day spoken New Zealand English (NZE) differ from animacy effects in other varieties of English. We seek to determine if such differences have a history in earlier NZE writing or not. We revisit two grammatical phenomena — progressives and genitives — that are well known to be sensitive to animacy effects, and we study these phenomena in corpora sampling 19th- and early 20th-century written NZE; for reference purposes, we also study parallel samples of 19th- and early 20th-century British English and American English. We indeed find significant regional differences between early New Zealand writing and the other varieties in terms of the effect that animacy has on the frequency and probabilities of grammatical phenomena

Semantics as a gateway to language

This paper presents an account of semantics as a system that integrates conceptual representations into language. I define the semantic system as an interface level of the conceptual system CS that translates conceptual representations into a format that is accessible by language. The analysis I put forward does not treat the make up of this level as idiosyncratic, but subsumes it under a unified notion of linguistic interfaces. This allows us to understand core aspects of the linguistic-conceptual interface as an instance of a general pattern underlying the correlation of linguistic and non-linguistic structures. By doing so, the model aims to provide a broader perspective onto the distinction between and interaction of conceptual and linguistic processes and the correlation of semantic and syntactic structures