LTAG analysis for pied-piping and stranding of wh-phrases

In this paper we propose a syntactic and semantic analysis of complex questions. We consider questions involving pied piping and stranding and we propose elementary trees and semantic representations that allow to account for both constructions in a uniform way

A Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar for English

This paper presents a sizable grammar for English written in the Tree Adjoining grammar (TAG) formalism. The grammar uses a TAG that is both lexicalized (Schabes, Abeillé, Joshi 1988) and feature-based (Vijay-Shankar, Joshi 1988). In this paper, we describe a wide range of phenomena that it covers. A Lexicalized TAG (LTAG) is organized around a lexicon, which associates sets of elementary trees (instead of just simple categories) with the lexical items. A Lexicalized TAG consists of a finite set of trees associated with lexical items, and operations (adjunction and substitution) for composing the trees. A lexical item is called the anchor of its corresponding tree and directly determines both the tree\u27s structure and its syntactic features. In particular, the trees define the domain of locality over which constraints are specified and these constraints are local with respect to their anchor. In this paper, the basic tree structures of the English LTAG are described, along with some relevant features. The interaction between the morphological and the syntactic components of the lexicon is also explained. Next, the properties of the different tree structures are discussed. The use of S complements exclusively allows us to take full advantage of the treatment of unbounded dependencies originally presented in Joshi (1985) and Kroch and Joshi (1985). Structures for auxiliaries and raising-verbs which use adjunction trees are also discussed. We present a representation of prepositional complements that is based on extended elementary trees. This representation avoids the need for preposition incorporation in order to account for double wh-questions (preposition stranding and pied-piping) and the pseudo-passive. A treatment of light verb constructions is also given, similar to what Abeillé (1988c) has presented. Again, neither noun nor adjective incorporation is needed to handle double passives and to account for CNPC violations in these constructions. TAG\u27S extended domain of locality allows us to handle, within a single level of syntactic description, phenomena that in other frameworks require either dual analyses or reanalysis. In addition, following Abeillé and Schabes (1989), we describe how to deal with semantic non compositionality in verb-particle combinations, light verb constructions and idioms, without losing the internal syntactic composition of these structures. The last sections discuss current work on PRO, case, anaphora and negation, and outline future work on copula constructions and small clauses, optional arguments, adverb movement and the nature of syntactic rules in a lexicalized framework

Binding theory in LTAG

This paper provides a unification-based implementation of Binding Theory (BT) for the English language in the framework of feature-based lexicalized tree-adjoining grammar (LTAG). The grammar presented here does not actually coindex any noun phrases, it merely outputs a set of constraints on co- and contraindexation that may later be processed by a separate anaphora resolution module. It improves on previous work by implementing the full BT rather than just Condition A. The main technical innovation consists in allowing lists to appear as values of semantic features

A Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar for English

This document describes a sizable grammar of English written in the TAG formalism and implemented for use with the XTAG system. This report and the grammar described herein supersedes the TAG grammar described in an earlier 1995 XTAG technical report. The English grammar described in this report is based on the TAG formalism which has been extended to include lexicalization, and unification-based feature structures. The range of syntactic phenomena that can be handled is large and includes auxiliaries (including inversion), copula, raising and small clause constructions, topicalization, relative clauses, infinitives, gerunds, passives, adjuncts, it-clefts, wh-clefts, PRO constructions, noun-noun modifications, extraposition, determiner sequences, genitives, negation, noun-verb contractions, sentential adjuncts and imperatives. This technical report corresponds to the XTAG Release 8/31/98. The XTAG grammar is continuously updated with the addition of new analyses and modification of old ones, and an online version of this report can be found at the XTAG web page at http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~xtag/Comment: 310 pages, 181 Postscript figures, uses 11pt, psfig.te

Wide-coverage statistical parsing with minimalist grammars

Syntactic parsing is the process of automatically assigning a structure to a string of words, and is arguably a necessary prerequisite for obtaining a detailed and precise representation of sentence meaning. For many NLP tasks, it is sufficient to use parsers based on simple context free grammars. However, for tasks in which precision on certain relatively rare but semantically crucial constructions (such as unbounded wh-movements for open domain question answering) is important, more expressive grammatical frameworks still have an important role to play. One grammatical framework which has been conspicuously absent from journals and conferences on Natural Language Processing (NLP), despite continuing to dominate much of theoretical syntax, is Minimalism, the latest incarnation of the Transformational Grammar (TG) approach to linguistic theory developed very extensively by Noam Chomsky and many others since the early 1950s. Until now, all parsers using genuine transformational movement operations have had only narrow coverage by modern standards, owing to the lack of any wide-coverage TG grammars or treebanks on which to train statistical models. The received wisdom within NLP is that TG is too complex and insufficiently formalised to be applied to realistic parsing tasks. This situation is unfortunate, as it is arguably the most extensively developed syntactic theory across the greatest number of languages, many of which are otherwise under-resourced, and yet the vast majority of its insights never find their way into NLP systems. Conversely, the process of constructing large grammar fragments can have a salutary impact on the theory itself, forcing choices between competing analyses of the same construction, and exposing incompatibilities between analyses of different constructions, along with areas of over- and undergeneration which may otherwise go unnoticed. This dissertation builds on research into computational Minimalism pioneered by Ed Stabler and others since the late 1990s to present the first ever wide-coverage Minimalist Grammar (MG) parser, along with some promising initial experimental results. A wide-coverage parser must of course be equipped with a wide-coverage grammar, and this dissertation will therefore also present the first ever wide-coverage MG, which has analyses with a high level of cross-linguistic descriptive adequacy for a great many English constructions, many of which are taken or adapted from proposals in the mainstream Minimalist literature. The grammar is very deep, in the sense that it describes many long-range dependencies which even most other expressive wide-coverage grammars ignore. At the same time, it has also been engineered to be highly constrained, with continuous computational testing being applied to minimize both under- and over-generation. Natural language is highly ambiguous, both locally and globally, and even with a very strong formal grammar, there may still be a great many possible structures for a given sentence and its substrings. The standard approach to resolving such ambiguity is to equip the parser with a probability model allowing it to disregard certain unlikely search paths, thereby increasing both its efficiency and accuracy. The most successful parsing models are those extracted in a supervised fashion from labelled data in the form of a corpus of syntactic trees, known as a treebank. Constructing such a treebank from scratch for a different formalism is extremely time-consuming and expensive, however, and so the standard approach is to map the trees in an existing treebank into trees of the target formalism. Minimalist trees are considerably more complex than those of other formalisms, however, containing many more null heads and movement operations, making this conversion process far from trivial. This dissertation will describe a method which has so far been used to convert 56% of the Penn Treebank trees into MG trees. Although still under development, the resulting MGbank corpus has already been used to train a statistical A* MG parser, described here, which has an expected asymptotic time complexity of O(n3); this is much better than even the most optimistic worst case analysis for the formalism

Tree Adjoining Grammar at the Interfaces

This thesis constitutes an exploration of the applications of tree adjoining grammar (TAG) to natural language syntax. Perhaps more than any of its major competitors such as HPSG and LFG, however, TAG has never strayed too far from the guiding principles of generative syntax. Indeed, following the pioneering work of Frank (2004), TAG has been successfully incorporated into Chomsky’s (1995) Minimalist Program (MP). In large part, however, Frank (2004) leaves unexplored the issue of how TAG applies at the PF and LF interfaces. Given the fundamental importance of interfaces within the MP, no minimalist syntactic theory is complete without at least some notion of the means by which syntactic structure relates to pronunciation and interpretation. In this thesis we attempt to provide insight on this very issue: we address how TAG interfaces with the articulatory and interpretive components of the language faculty, and what insights it provides to minimalist conceptions of these interfaces. Ultimately, our aim is both to reaffirm the viability of TAG as a minimalist syntactic theory as well as to demonstrate that TAG makes clear otherwise arcane facts in natural language syntax. The central proposal of this thesis is twofold. First, TAG may be naturally extended to interface with the articulatory and interpretive components of the language faculty by making recourse to synchronous TAG (STAG). Second, once such a framework has been adopted, minimalist ideas regarding the interaction between syntax and linear order can be applied to deal with certain problematic examples in the TAG framework. TAG thus offers confirmation that in at least some cases, certain aspects of linear order are dependent on post-syntactic operations, so that syntax does not always wholly determine linear order. As a corollary of our proposal, we also demonstrate, through a case study in Niuean raising, that the TAG system makes clear predictions on phenomena that are difficult to describe in mainstream minimalist theories. Our argumentation for these proposals proceeds in three major stages. First, we formalize the synchronous TAG system that has to date been applied in a mostly piecemeal way by various researchers (see Shieber & Nesson 2006, Frank & Storoshenko 2012 for some examples). As a part of this formalization, we argue that the derivation of the LF object, but not the PF object, should make recourse to a more expressive version of the TAG system: multicomponent TAG, a variant that relaxes some constraints on the primitive units in the TAG system to yield greater expressive power. Second, we argue that the STAG system lends credence to the view that at least some word order is determined post-syntactically. In the past, researchers have presented ad hoc extensions of the expressive power of TAG to handle various difficult examples such as subject-to-subject raising in English questions and Irish and Welsh main clauses. We demonstrate that these extensions are both theoretically suspect and ultimately unnecessary given minimalist notions of the derivation: for many of the data motivating these extensions, there is independent evidence that their derivation in fact relies on post-syntactic rearrangements of certain verbal heads. Such examples are therefore well within the generative capacity of a framework with a TAG-based syntactic component that allows certain specific and well motivated post-syntactic rearrangements. Third, we demonstrate that not only is our particular system well motivated within the theoretical bounds of the MP, but also that it makes surprising and accurate empirical predications in cases that have otherwise defied analysis. Specifically, the Austronesian language Niuean features a peculiar instance of raising that has defied a satisfactory analysis since its discovery by Seiter (1980, 1983). We show that TAG makes the clear prediction that there is no raising in Niuean, then argue that this prediction is borne out under a careful examination of the facts. Given that the framework was developed almost exclusively based on the Indo-European language family, its ability to capture confounding behavior in a typologically dissimilar Austronesian language is a strong confirmation of its status as a reasonable alternative to mainstream minimalist syntactic theories

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism)

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism)

From transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches

Synopsis: This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured.This book is a new edition of http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/25, http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/195, http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/255 , and http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/287.Fifth revised and extended editio

Grammatical theory

This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured. The book is a translation of the German book Grammatiktheorie, which was published by Stauffenburg in 2010. The following quotes are taken from reviews: With this critical yet fair reflection on various grammatical theories, Müller fills what was a major gap in the literature. Karen Lehmann, Zeitschrift für Rezen­sio­nen zur ger­man­is­tis­chen Sprach­wis­senschaft, 2012 Stefan Müller’s recent introductory textbook, Gram­matik­the­o­rie, is an astonishingly comprehensive and insightful survey for beginning students of the present state of syntactic theory. Wolfgang Sternefeld und Frank Richter, Zeitschrift für Sprach­wissen­schaft, 2012 This is the kind of work that has been sought after for a while [...] The impartial and objective discussion offered by the author is particularly refreshing. Werner Abraham, Germanistik, 201