Interaction Grammars

Interaction Grammar (IG) is a grammatical formalism based on the notion of polarity. Polarities express the resource sensitivity of natural languages by modelling the distinction between saturated and unsaturated syntactic structures. Syntactic composition is represented as a chemical reaction guided by the saturation of polarities. It is expressed in a model-theoretic framework where grammars are constraint systems using the notion of tree description and parsing appears as a process of building tree description models satisfying criteria of saturation and minimality

Learnability and Overgeneration in Computational Syntax

This paper addresses the hypothesis that unnatural patterns generated by grammar formalisms can be eliminated on the grounds that they are unlearnable. I consider three examples of formal languages thought to represent dependencies unattested in natural language syntax, and show that all three can be learned by grammar induction algorithms following the Distributional Learning paradigm of Clark and Eyraud (2007). While learnable language classes are restrictive by necessity (Gold, 1967), these facts suggest that learnability alone may be insufficient for addressing concerns of overgeneration in syntax

Semantically inactive multiplicatives and words as types

The literature on categorial type logic includes proposals for semantically inactive additives, quantifiers, and modalities (Morrill 1994[17]; Hepple 1990[2]; Moortgat 1997[9]), but to our knowledge there has been no proposal for semantically inactive multiplicatives. In this paper we formulate such a proposal (thus filling a gap in the typology of categorial connectives) in the context of the displacement calculus Morrill et al. (2011[16]), and we give a formulation of words as types whereby for every expression w there is a corresponding type W(w). We show how this machinary can treat the syntax and semantics of collocations involving apparently contentless words such as expletives, particle verbs, and (discontinuous) idioms. In addition, we give an account in these terms of the only known examples treated by Hybrid Type Logical Grammar (HTLG henceforth; Kubota and Levine 2012[4]) beyond the scope of unaugmented displacement calculus: gapping of particle verbs and discontinuous idioms.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Individuation Criteria, Dot-types and Copredication:A View from Modern Type Theories

International audienceIn this paper we revisit the issue of copredica-tion from the perspective of modern type theories. Specifically, we look at: a) the counting properties of dot-types, and b) the case of a complex dot-type that has remained unsolved in the literature, i.e. that of newspaper. As regards a), we show that the account proposed in (Luo, 2010) for dot-types makes the correct predictions as regards counting. In order to verify this, we implement the account in the Coq proof-assistant and check that the desired inferences follow. Then, we look at the case of b), the case of a dot-type which is both resource and context sensitive. We propose a further resource sensitive version of the dot-type, in effect a linear dot-type. This along with local coercions can account for the behaviour attested

Plurals: individuals and sets in a richly typed semantics

We developed a type-theoretical framework for natural lan- guage semantics that, in addition to the usual Montagovian treatment of compositional semantics, includes a treatment of some phenomena of lex- ical semantic: coercions, meaning, transfers, (in)felicitous co-predication. In this setting we see how the various readings of plurals (collective, dis- tributive, coverings,...) can be modelled

Curbing Feature Coding: Strictly Local Feature Assignment

Graf (2017) warns that every syntactic formalism faces a severe overgeneration problem because of the hidden power of subcategorization. Any constraint definable in monadic second-order logic can be compiled into the category system so that it is indirectly enforced as part of subcategorization. Not only does this kind of feature coding deprive syntactic proposals of their empirical bite, it also undermines computational efforts to limit syntactic formalisms via subregular complexity. This paper presents a subregular solution to feature coding. Instead of features being a cheap resource that comes for free, features must be assigned by a transduction. In particular, category features must be assigned by an input strictly local (ISL) tree-to-tree transduction, defined here for the first time. The restriction to ISL transductions correctly rules out various deviant category systems