Between syntax and morphology

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

Syntactic architecture and its consequences II

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

Proceedings of the 2010 Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft für Semantik

Sinn & Bedeutung - the annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Semantik - aims to bring together both established researchers and new blood working on current issues in natural language semantics, pragmatics, the syntax-semantics interface, the philosophy of language or carrying out psycholinguistic studies related to meaning. Every year, the conference moves to a different location in Europe. The 2010 conference - Sinn & Bedeutung 15 - took place on September 9 - 11 at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, organized by the Department for German Studies

Tune your brown clustering, please

Brown clustering, an unsupervised hierarchical clustering technique based on ngram mutual information, has proven useful in many NLP applications. However, most uses of Brown clustering employ the same default configuration; the appropriateness of this configuration has gone predominantly unexplored. Accordingly, we present information for practitioners on the behaviour of Brown clustering in order to assist hyper-parametre tuning, in the form of a theoretical model of Brown clustering utility. This model is then evaluated empirically in two sequence labelling tasks over two text types. We explore the dynamic between the input corpus size, chosen number of classes, and quality of the resulting clusters, which has an impact for any approach using Brown clustering. In every scenario that we examine, our results reveal that the values most commonly used for the clustering are sub-optimal

Handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar

Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a nontransformational theory of linguistic structure, first developed in the 1970s by Joan Bresnan and Ronald M. Kaplan, which assumes that language is best described and modeled by parallel structures representing different facets of linguistic organization and information, related by means of functional correspondences. This volume has five parts. Part I, Overview and Introduction, provides an introduction to core syntactic concepts and representations. Part II, Grammatical Phenomena, reviews LFG work on a range of grammatical phenomena or constructions. Part III, Grammatical modules and interfaces, provides an overview of LFG work on semantics, argument structure, prosody, information structure, and morphology. Part IV, Linguistic disciplines, reviews LFG work in the disciplines of historical linguistics, learnability, psycholinguistics, and second language learning. Part V, Formal and computational issues and applications, provides an overview of computational and formal properties of the theory, implementations, and computational work on parsing, translation, grammar induction, and treebanks. Part VI, Language families and regions, reviews LFG work on languages spoken in particular geographical areas or in particular language families. The final section, Comparing LFG with other linguistic theories, discusses LFG work in relation to other theoretical approaches

Speaking of pragmatics: Addressing discourse in Finnish and Japanese syntax

Matters of discourse are often dismissed into the fringes of linguistics. However, a growing body of recent research on various discourse-related elements has revived the idea attributed to Ross (1970) of representing the notions of speaker and addressee syntactically. The goal of this dissertation is to shed further comparative light on the syntactization of pragmatics – especially speakers and addressees– and to contribute to the understanding of what kind of cross-linguistic points of variation can be found here. The comparison focuses on Finnish and Japanese, chosen as they are genetically and geographically unrelated, yet typologically similar in manifesting a great degree of discourse-sensitivity. I argue that to wholly understand a variety of discourse-related phenomena – discourse particles, the expression of contrast, and different instances of nullness – the standard structures postulated for Finnish and Japanese syntax have to be reconsidered, and build up to encode additional speech act-related layers in accordance with Wiltschko and Heim’s (2016) Universal Spine Hypothesis. Chapter 3 discusses the Finnish second-position clitics -hAn and -pA as well as an array of Japanese sentence-final particles, showing that their pragmatic contribution is best understood through notions relating to discourse participants, and that this implies the presence of a speech act -related layer above the CP. Chapter 4 contrasts the behaviour of the particles with contrastive elements in the two languages, showing that there is a strong empirical case to be made for a divide between the CP and the higher layer. Chapter 5 zooms in on the inner structure of the higher layer, and argues based on evidence from interrogatives that the speech act layer is further divided into Grounding and Response layers. Finally, I turn to the importance of internal contrasts and scales in syntax: gradience and contrasts built on hierarchies are shown to play a crucial role in properly understanding the behaviour of null subjects and possessive suffixes in Finnish and case marker drop in Japanese. What emerges is a re-thought syntactic frame for Finnish and Japanese as well as new comparative evidence on the importance of speakers and addressees.St John's College Benefactors' Scholarshi

Phrase-level Grouping for Lexical Gap Resolution in Korean-Vietnamese SMT

A lexical gap easily leads to word alignment errors, which impairs a translation quality. This paper proposes some simple ideas to resolve the difficulty of handling the lexical gap. In morphologically rich languages, a predicate has a complex structure consisting of many morphemes, so we mainly address the issue of how to group the component morphemes by employing morpho-syntactic filters and statistical information from the SMT phrase table. In addition, we abstract grouping results depending on a lexical choice of the target side to enhance translation probabilities. In the experiment, we not only investigate how each method has an effect on Korean-to-Vietnamese SMT, but also show a promising improvement of BLEU score.1