Syntactic Computation as Labelled Deduction: WH a case study

This paper addresses the question "Why do WH phenomena occur with the particular cluster of properties observed across languages -- long-distance dependencies, WH-in situ, partial movement constructions, reconstruction, crossover etc." These phenomena have been analysed by invoking a number of discrete principles and categories, but have so far resisted a unified treatment. The explanation proposed is set within a model of natural language understanding in context, where the task of understanding is taken to be the incremental building of a structure over which the semantic content is defined. The formal model is a composite of a labelled type-deduction system, a modal tree logic, and a set of rules for describing the process of interpreting the string as a set of transition states. A dynamic concept of syntax results, in which in addition to an output structure associated with each string (analogous to the level of LF), there is in addition an explicit meta-level description of the process whereby this incremental process takes place. This paper argues that WH-related phenomena can be unified by adopting this dynamic perspective. The main focus of the paper is on WH-initial structures, WH in situ structures, partial movement phenomena, and crossover phenomena. In each case, an analysis is proposed which emerges from the general characterisatioan of WH structures without construction-specific stipulation.Articl

Resolving pronominal anaphora using commonsense knowledge

Coreference resolution is the task of resolving all expressions in a text that refer to the same entity. Such expressions are often used in writing and speech as shortcuts to avoid repetition. The most frequent form of coreference is the anaphor. To resolve anaphora not only grammatical and syntactical strategies are required, but also semantic approaches should be taken into consideration. This dissertation presents a framework for automatically resolving pronominal anaphora by integrating recent findings from the field of linguistics with new semantic features. Commonsense knowledge is the routine knowledge people have of the everyday world. Because such knowledge is widely used it is frequently omitted from social communications such as texts. It is understandable that without this knowledge computers will have difficulty making sense of textual information. In this dissertation a new set of computational and linguistic features are used in a supervised learning approach to resolve the pronominal anaphora in document. Commonsense knowledge sources such as ConceptNet and WordNet are used and similarity measures are extracted to uncover the elaborative information embedded in the words that can help in the process of anaphora resolution. The anaphoric system is tested on 350 Wall Street Journal articles from the BBN corpus. When compared with other systems available such as BART (Versley et al. 2008) and Charniak and Elsner 2009, our system performed better and also resolved a much wider range of anaphora. We were able to achieve a 92% F-measure on the BBN corpus and an average of 85% F-measure when tested on other genres of documents such as children stories and short stories selected from the web

Review of coreference resolution in English and Persian

Coreference resolution (CR) is one of the most challenging areas of natural language processing. This task seeks to identify all textual references to the same real-world entity. Research in this field is divided into coreference resolution and anaphora resolution. Due to its application in textual comprehension and its utility in other tasks such as information extraction systems, document summarization, and machine translation, this field has attracted considerable interest. Consequently, it has a significant effect on the quality of these systems. This article reviews the existing corpora and evaluation metrics in this field. Then, an overview of the coreference algorithms, from rule-based methods to the latest deep learning techniques, is provided. Finally, coreference resolution and pronoun resolution systems in Persian are investigated.Comment: 44 pages, 11 figures, 5 table

Paths through meaning and form: Festschrift offered to Klaus von Heusinger on the occasion of his 60th birthday

“Paths through meaning and form. Festschrift offered to Klaus von Heusinger on the occasion of his 60th birthday” umfasst 60 Beiträge von Kolleginnen und Kollegen, die mit Klaus von Heusinger in seiner wissenschaftlichen Laufbahn zusammengearbeitet haben. Die in den einzelnen Beiträgen behandelten Themen gehen auf Prominenz, Referentialität, Quantifikation, Kasus, Spracherwerb und experimentelle Psycholinguistik ein

The Head-Quarters of Mandarin Arguments

This dissertation looks at the syntactic distributions of various Mandarin arguments and develops an argument structure that takes into account the arguments’ semantic types. Theories of argument realization mostly build on a one-to-one correspondence between the syntactic positions of arguments and the thematic relations they bear to the verb in the underlying structure. And this correspondence is rooted in the assumption that the argument positions in the verb’s projection must be saturated before other semantic compositions can take place. This dissertation argues that the saturation requirement can be alleviated, depending on whether languages make a morphological distinction in their syntax. Making the distinction would then lead to the non-existence of the correspondence, resulting in arguments with a particular theta-role being able to base-generate in different positions inside the verb’s projection. Three general patterns of argument distribution are investigated, all in the presence of a post-verbal temporal adverbial modifying the verb’s duration/frequency. The first pattern, Pattern I, describes the positions of internal arguments relative to that of the post-verbal adverbial, regulated by the arguments’ semantic types. I argue that Pattern I is part of a widely known phenomenon, Pseudo-(Noun)-Incorporation (Massam, 2001), where the arguments in the form of bare NPs occur in the lowest syntactic position adjacent to the verb. I propose a separate syntactic head that encodes the internal theta-roles of the verb, mediating the realizations of arguments by their types. It is argued that once a language incorporates this head, whose scope is hypothesized to be a morphological domain, the language is pseudo-incorporating and is able to have non-argument-saturated VPs. Many pseudo-incorporating properties are consequently derivable. The second pattern, Pattern II, describes the preverbal displacement of internal arguments, accompanied by a bare copy of the verb or not. Further categorized as Type I and Type II, where the former lacks and the latter involves the bare verb copy, Pattern II is argued to be cases of sentence-internal topicalization. Arguing against many previous analyses, I show that Type I is not focalization but topicalization, siding with Paul (2002, 2005) and Badan (2008). And by comparing Type II to the VP-copying construction in Hebrew (Landau, 2006, 2007), I argue that Type II should also operate under the rules of topicalization. That is, a unified account of topicalization can be achieved for both Type I and II. The post-verbal temporal adverbial is shown to enable Pattern II in a way that it should be treated as a pragmatic trigger for the topicalization. Finally, the third pattern, Pattern III, describes an inversion between the internal and external argument in the obligatory presence of the post-verbal temporal adverbial. It is argued to involve causativization of the eventualities denoted by the verb. More specifically put, it is argued to be a causativization strategy Mandarin employs for the relation between the occurrence and the duration/frequency of the eventualities by means of a causative head in syntax. In other words, the inversion of the arguments is the manifestation of causativization, and is connected to the obligatory post-verbal temporal adverbial that is the resulting end of this causal relation

Demonstratives in discourse

This volume explores the use of demonstratives in the structuring and management of discourse, and their role as engagement expressions, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It seeks to establish which types of discourse-related functions are commonly encoded by demonstratives, beyond the well-established reference-tracking and deictic uses, and also investigates which members of demonstrative paradigms typically take on certain functions. Moreover, it looks at the roles of non-deictic demonstratives, that is, members of the paradigm which are dedicated e.g. to contrastive, recognitional, or anaphoric functions and do not express deictic distinctions. Several of the studies also focus on manner demonstratives, which have been little studied from a crosslinguistic perspective. The volume thus broadens the scope of investigation of demonstratives to look at how their core functions interact with a wider range of discourse functions in a number of different languages. The volume covers languages from a range of geographical locations and language families, including Cushitic and Mande languages in Africa, Oceanic and Papuan languages in the Pacific region, Algonquian and Guaykuruan in the Americas, and Germanic, Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in the Eurasian region. It also includes two papers taking a broader typological approach to specific discourse functions of demonstratives

Kashmiri to English Machine Translation: A Study of Morpho-Syntactic Divergence Patterns

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Conditions on argument drop

This article pursues the idea that null arguments are derived without any statement or parameter, instead following "naturally" from 3rd factor principles and effects (in the sense of Chomsky 2005). The article thus contributes to the program of eliminating statements in grammar in favor of general factors. More specifically, it develops a theory of C/edge linking in terms of syntactically active but silent C-features, where all referential definite arguments, overt and silent, must match these features in order to be successfully C/edge-linked (interpreted). On the approach pursued, radically silent arguments-such as Germanic zero topics and controlled 3rd person null subjects in Finnish-commonly raise across a lexical C (a complementizer or a verb-second (V2) verb) into the edge of the C-domain for the purpose of successful C/edge linking (circumventing C-intervention), thereby showing (A) over bar -behavior not observed for other types of arguments (including the Romance type of pro). Silent arguments are universally available in syntax, whereas their C/edge linking is constrained by factors (such as Germanic V2) that may or may not be present or active in individual languages and constructions