164 research outputs found

    Evaluation of a Grammar of French Determiners

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    Existing syntactic grammars of natural languages, even with a far from complete coverage, are complex objects. Assessments of the quality of parts of such grammars are useful for the validation of their construction. We evaluated the quality of a grammar of French determiners that takes the form of a recursive transition network. The result of the application of this local grammar gives deeper syntactic information than chunking or information available in treebanks. We performed the evaluation by comparison with a corpus independently annotated with information on determiners. We obtained 86% precision and 92% recall on text not tagged for parts of speech.Comment: 10 page

    Order and structure

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    Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (p. [291]-306).by Colin Phillips.Ph.D

    Implicit Prosody in Silent Reading: Relative Clause Attachment in Croatian

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    When a relative clause (RC) follows two nouns (N1, N2) in a complex noun phrase such as that contained in the example English sentence below, the preferred interpretation has been found to differ across languages. (1) Someone shot the servant [N1] of the actress [N2] who was on the balcony [RC]. In some languages (e.g., English), readers preferentially interpret the RC as attaching to (i.e., modifying) N2. In other languages (e.g., Spanish), there is a preference for attachment to N1. This cross-linguistic variation is the only known counterevidence to the claim that the human sentence processing routines are universal, and could therefore be innate. Five major explanations have been proposed in the literature to account for cross-linguistic differences in RC-attachment: the Construal/Gricean account, Attachment-Binding Dualism, the Predicate Proximity/Recency model, the Tuning Hypothesis, and the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH). This thesis examines RC-attachment preferences in Croatian. The data reported address four of the above proposals: they argue against the first three and support the fifth, the IPH. (The data do not bear on the Tuning Hypothesis, which holds that there is no principled parsing explanation for the cross-linguistic facts.) The IPH claims that a default prosodic pattern, which may differ across languages, is mentally computed during silent reading, influencing syntactic attachment decisions. Croatian has a distinctive pattern of prosodic phrasing in that in sentences comparable to (1), it favors a prosodic break before a long RC as compared with a short RC, and a prosodic break before the preposition in the complex NP construction as compared with the non-prepositional variant of the same construction. (Both variants of the construction, prepositional and non-prepositional, are acceptable in Croatian.) The experimental findings reported here document these prosodic characteristics, and show that they are reflected in syntactic attachment preferences in silent reading. This evidence is important because if the IPH is correct, then cross-language RC-attachment differences are attributable to independently demonstrable differences in the prosodic principles in the grammar. That is, they fall into line with other observed parsing preferences in that they do not reflect non-universal processing routines

    Subject-Verb Agreement with Coordinated Subjects in Ancient Greek. A Treebank-based Study

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    In Ancient Greek, as well as in other languages, whenever agreement is triggered by two or more coordinated phrases, two different constructions are allowed: either the agreement can be controlled by the coordinated phrase as a whole, or it can be triggered by just one of the coordinated words. In spite of the amount of information that can be read on this topic in grammars of Ancient Greek, much is still to be known even at a general descriptive level. More importantly, the data still lack a convincing explanation. In this paper, we focus on a special domain of agreement (subject and verb agreement) and on one morphological feature that is expected to covary (number). We discuss the agreement in number for conjoined phrases, by revising some of the modern hypotheses with the support of the empirical evidence that can be collected from the available syntactically annotated corpora of Ancient Greek (treebanks). Results are interpreted according to syntactic features, cognitive factors and semantic properties of the coordinated phrases

    Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

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    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

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    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)

    Between syntax and morphology

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    Synopsis: This volume collects novel contributions to comparative generative linguistics that “rethink” existing approaches to an extensive range of phenomena, domains, and architectural questions in linguistic theory. At the heart of the contributions is the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy which has long animated generative linguistics and which continues to grow thanks to the increasing amount and diversity of data available to us. The chapters address research questions in comparative morphosyntax, including the modelling of syntactic categories, relative clauses, and demonstrative systems. Many of these contributions show the influence of research by Ian Roberts and collaborators and give the reader a sense of the lively nature of current discussion of topics in morphosyntax and morphosyntactic variation. This book is complemented by volume I available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/275 and volume III available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/277

    Grammar and Corpora 2016

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    In recent years, the availability of large annotated corpora, together with a new interest in the empirical foundation and validation of linguistic theory and description, has sparked a surge of novel work using corpus methods to study the grammar of natural languages. This volume presents recent developments and advances, firstly, in corpus-oriented grammar research with a special focus on Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages and, secondly, in corpus linguistic methodology as well as the application of corpus methods to grammar-related fields. The volume results from the sixth international conference Grammar and Corpora (GaC 2016), which took place at the Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany, in November 2016

    The possessum-agreement construction or `Does Albanian have a genitive case?'

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