Encoding Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars with a Nonmonotonic Inheritance Hierarchy

This paper shows how DATR, a widely used formal language for lexical knowledge representation, can be used to define an LTAG lexicon as an inheritance hierarchy with internal lexical rules. A bottom-up featural encoding is used for LTAG trees and this allows lexical rules to be implemented as covariation constraints within feature structures. Such an approach eliminates the considerable redundancy otherwise associated with an LTAG lexicon.Comment: Latex source, needs aclap.sty, 8 page

Two Types of Complex Predicate Formation: Japanese Passive and Potential Verbs

PACLIC 21 / Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea / November 1-3, 200

How conceptual structure impinges on constructional behavior. The case of give verbs

This article aims to cast light on the constructional behavior of nine of Levin's (1993) give verbs, i.e. feed, lease, lend, loan, pay, peddle, rent, sell, and trade, in the ditransitive and dative constructions. This paper also proposes onomasiological hierarchies for these verbs on the basis of Faber and Mairal's (1999) lexematics-oriented taxonomies. My findings concur with Levin' (1993) and Faber and Mairal's (1999) hypothesis according to which the internal semantic parameters of a given verb function as predictors of that verb's syntactic representations. In a hierarchy of predicates, the hyponyms display the same complementation patterns as their genus or superordinate predicate. Nevertheless, some verbs inherit partial semantic and syntactic behavior from more than one lexical class. A verb like trade inherits conceptual structure both from give (cf. They traded him to the Cubs) and exchange (e.g. Jason traded Thomas his laptop for a mobile phone)

Nominalization and Alternations in Biomedical Language

Background: This paper presents data on alternations in the argument structure of common domain-specific verbs and their associated verbal nominalizations in the PennBioIE corpus. Alternation is the term in theoretical linguistics for variations in the surface syntactic form of verbs, e.g. the different forms of stimulate in FSH stimulates follicular development and follicular development is stimulated by FSH. The data is used to assess the implications of alternations for biomedical text mining systems and to test the fit of the sublanguage model to biomedical texts. Methodology/Principal Findings: We examined 1,872 tokens of the ten most common domain-specific verbs or their zerorelated nouns in the PennBioIE corpus and labelled them for the presence or absence of three alternations. We then annotated the arguments of 746 tokens of the nominalizations related to these verbs and counted alternations related to the presence or absence of arguments and to the syntactic position of non-absent arguments. We found that alternations are quite common both for verbs and for nominalizations. We also found a previously undescribed alternation involving an adjectival present participle. Conclusions/Significance: We found that even in this semantically restricted domain, alternations are quite common, and alternations involving nominalizations are exceptionally diverse. Nonetheless, the sublanguage model applies to biomedica