The spell-out algorithm and lexicalization patterns: Slavic verbs and complementizers

Empirically, the book covers two areas: the morphosyntax of verbs and categories syncretic with the declarative complementizer in Slavic, together with a comparative look at the similar categories in Latvian (Baltic) and Basaá (Bantu). In the domain of verbs, the book investigates a curious instance of analytic vs. fusional realization of grammatical categories that we find in a semelfactive-iterative alternation in Czech and Polish, where a semelfactive verb stem such as in the Czech kop-n-ou-t ‘give a kick’ alternates with an iterative verb stem as in kop-a-t ‘kick repeatedly’. The iterative -aj stem is morphologi cally less complex than the semelfactive stem formed with the -n-ou sequence, which is paradoxical given an analysis of iteratives as categories whose syn-sem representation is more complex than semelfactives. In the domain of complementizers, the book focuses on cross-categorial paradigms that include an unexpected morphological containment (in Russian), a degree of morphological complexity (in Latvian), and an ABA pattern of syncretic alignment (in Basaá), which we do not expect to find if syncretism is restricted to adjacent cells in a paradigm (cf. Bobaljik 2012). Analytically, the book focuses on the way the syntactic representations of these categories become realized as morphemes. In the general sense, then, this contribution belongs to a growing body of work that investigates the relation between syntactic structure and morphological form, understood as the amount of morphemes and their placement – in particular the prefix vs. suffix opposition. More specifically, however, the approach to lexicalization taken up in this book is informed by the results of research on syntax in the last quarter of a century, which show that syntactic representations are maximally fine-grained, the picture sometimes described as the “one feature per one syntactic head” dictum. Such a scenario has lead to the situation where syntactic representations can be submorphemic, in the sense that a lexical item corresponds to more than one syntactic head, a strand of research that has become known as Nanosyntax. This book investigates the state-of-art methodology of Nanosyntax in resolving the selected empirical problems in the domain of Slavic verbs and declarative complementizers, the problems that all appear to boil down to the way syntactic representations become realized as morphemes

The spell-out algorithm and lexicalization patterns: Slavic verbs and complementizers

Empirically, the book covers two areas: the morphosyntax of verbs and categories syncretic with the declarative complementizer in Slavic, together with a comparative look at the similar categories in Latvian (Baltic) and Basaá (Bantu). In the domain of verbs, the book investigates a curious instance of analytic vs. fusional realization of grammatical categories that we find in a semelfactive-iterative alternation in Czech and Polish, where a semelfactive verb stem such as in the Czech kop-n-ou-t ‘give a kick’ alternates with an iterative verb stem as in kop-a-t ‘kick repeatedly’. The iterative -aj stem is morphologi cally less complex than the semelfactive stem formed with the -n-ou sequence, which is paradoxical given an analysis of iteratives as categories whose syn-sem representation is more complex than semelfactives. In the domain of complementizers, the book focuses on cross-categorial paradigms that include an unexpected morphological containment (in Russian), a degree of morphological complexity (in Latvian), and an ABA pattern of syncretic alignment (in Basaá), which we do not expect to find if syncretism is restricted to adjacent cells in a paradigm (cf. Bobaljik 2012). Analytically, the book focuses on the way the syntactic representations of these categories become realized as morphemes. In the general sense, then, this contribution belongs to a growing body of work that investigates the relation between syntactic structure and morphological form, understood as the amount of morphemes and their placement – in particular the prefix vs. suffix opposition. More specifically, however, the approach to lexicalization taken up in this book is informed by the results of research on syntax in the last quarter of a century, which show that syntactic representations are maximally fine-grained, the picture sometimes described as the “one feature per one syntactic head” dictum. Such a scenario has lead to the situation where syntactic representations can be submorphemic, in the sense that a lexical item corresponds to more than one syntactic head, a strand of research that has become known as Nanosyntax. This book investigates the state-of-art methodology of Nanosyntax in resolving the selected empirical problems in the domain of Slavic verbs and declarative complementizers, the problems that all appear to boil down to the way syntactic representations become realized as morphemes

The spell-out algorithm and lexicalization patterns: Slavic verbs and complementizers

Empirically, the book covers two areas: the morphosyntax of verbs and categories syncretic with the declarative complementizer in Slavic, together with a comparative look at the similar categories in Latvian (Baltic) and Basaá (Bantu). In the domain of verbs, the book investigates a curious instance of analytic vs. fusional realization of grammatical categories that we find in a semelfactive-iterative alternation in Czech and Polish, where a semelfactive verb stem such as in the Czech kop-n-ou-t ‘give a kick’ alternates with an iterative verb stem as in kop-a-t ‘kick repeatedly’. The iterative -aj stem is morphologi cally less complex than the semelfactive stem formed with the -n-ou sequence, which is paradoxical given an analysis of iteratives as categories whose syn-sem representation is more complex than semelfactives. In the domain of complementizers, the book focuses on cross-categorial paradigms that include an unexpected morphological containment (in Russian), a degree of morphological complexity (in Latvian), and an ABA pattern of syncretic alignment (in Basaá), which we do not expect to find if syncretism is restricted to adjacent cells in a paradigm (cf. Bobaljik 2012). Analytically, the book focuses on the way the syntactic representations of these categories become realized as morphemes. In the general sense, then, this contribution belongs to a growing body of work that investigates the relation between syntactic structure and morphological form, understood as the amount of morphemes and their placement – in particular the prefix vs. suffix opposition. More specifically, however, the approach to lexicalization taken up in this book is informed by the results of research on syntax in the last quarter of a century, which show that syntactic representations are maximally fine-grained, the picture sometimes described as the “one feature per one syntactic head” dictum. Such a scenario has lead to the situation where syntactic representations can be submorphemic, in the sense that a lexical item corresponds to more than one syntactic head, a strand of research that has become known as Nanosyntax. This book investigates the state-of-art methodology of Nanosyntax in resolving the selected empirical problems in the domain of Slavic verbs and declarative complementizers, the problems that all appear to boil down to the way syntactic representations become realized as morphemes

The spell-out algorithm and lexicalization patterns: Slavic verbs and complementizers

Empirically, the book covers two areas: the morphosyntax of verbs and categories syncretic with the declarative complementizer in Slavic, together with a comparative look at the similar categories in Latvian (Baltic) and Basaá (Bantu). In the domain of verbs, the book investigates a curious instance of analytic vs. fusional realization of grammatical categories that we find in a semelfactive-iterative alternation in Czech and Polish, where a semelfactive verb stem such as in the Czech kop-n-ou-t ‘give a kick’ alternates with an iterative verb stem as in kop-a-t ‘kick repeatedly’. The iterative -aj stem is morphologi cally less complex than the semelfactive stem formed with the -n-ou sequence, which is paradoxical given an analysis of iteratives as categories whose syn-sem representation is more complex than semelfactives. In the domain of complementizers, the book focuses on cross-categorial paradigms that include an unexpected morphological containment (in Russian), a degree of morphological complexity (in Latvian), and an ABA pattern of syncretic alignment (in Basaá), which we do not expect to find if syncretism is restricted to adjacent cells in a paradigm (cf. Bobaljik 2012). Analytically, the book focuses on the way the syntactic representations of these categories become realized as morphemes. In the general sense, then, this contribution belongs to a growing body of work that investigates the relation between syntactic structure and morphological form, understood as the amount of morphemes and their placement – in particular the prefix vs. suffix opposition. More specifically, however, the approach to lexicalization taken up in this book is informed by the results of research on syntax in the last quarter of a century, which show that syntactic representations are maximally fine-grained, the picture sometimes described as the “one feature per one syntactic head” dictum. Such a scenario has lead to the situation where syntactic representations can be submorphemic, in the sense that a lexical item corresponds to more than one syntactic head, a strand of research that has become known as Nanosyntax. This book investigates the state-of-art methodology of Nanosyntax in resolving the selected empirical problems in the domain of Slavic verbs and declarative complementizers, the problems that all appear to boil down to the way syntactic representations become realized as morphemes

The spell-out algorithm and lexicalization patterns: Slavic verbs and complementizers

Empirically, the book covers two areas: the morphosyntax of verbs and categories syncretic with the declarative complementizer in Slavic, together with a comparative look at the similar categories in Latvian (Baltic) and Basaá (Bantu). In the domain of verbs, the book investigates a curious instance of analytic vs. fusional realization of grammatical categories that we find in a semelfactive-iterative alternation in Czech and Polish, where a semelfactive verb stem such as in the Czech kop-n-ou-t ‘give a kick’ alternates with an iterative verb stem as in kop-a-t ‘kick repeatedly’. The iterative -aj stem is morphologi cally less complex than the semelfactive stem formed with the -n-ou sequence, which is paradoxical given an analysis of iteratives as categories whose syn-sem representation is more complex than semelfactives. In the domain of complementizers, the book focuses on cross-categorial paradigms that include an unexpected morphological containment (in Russian), a degree of morphological complexity (in Latvian), and an ABA pattern of syncretic alignment (in Basaá), which we do not expect to find if syncretism is restricted to adjacent cells in a paradigm (cf. Bobaljik 2012). Analytically, the book focuses on the way the syntactic representations of these categories become realized as morphemes. In the general sense, then, this contribution belongs to a growing body of work that investigates the relation between syntactic structure and morphological form, understood as the amount of morphemes and their placement – in particular the prefix vs. suffix opposition. More specifically, however, the approach to lexicalization taken up in this book is informed by the results of research on syntax in the last quarter of a century, which show that syntactic representations are maximally fine-grained, the picture sometimes described as the “one feature per one syntactic head” dictum. Such a scenario has lead to the situation where syntactic representations can be submorphemic, in the sense that a lexical item corresponds to more than one syntactic head, a strand of research that has become known as Nanosyntax. This book investigates the state-of-art methodology of Nanosyntax in resolving the selected empirical problems in the domain of Slavic verbs and declarative complementizers, the problems that all appear to boil down to the way syntactic representations become realized as morphemes

The spell-out algorithm and lexicalization patterns: Slavic verbs and complementizers

Empirically, the book covers two areas: the morphosyntax of verbs and categories syncretic with the declarative complementizer in Slavic, together with a comparative look at the similar categories in Latvian (Baltic) and Basaá (Bantu). In the domain of verbs, the book investigates a curious instance of analytic vs. fusional realization of grammatical categories that we find in a semelfactive-iterative alternation in Czech and Polish, where a semelfactive verb stem such as in the Czech kop-n-ou-t ‘give a kick’ alternates with an iterative verb stem as in kop-a-t ‘kick repeatedly’. The iterative -aj stem is morphologi cally less complex than the semelfactive stem formed with the -n-ou sequence, which is paradoxical given an analysis of iteratives as categories whose syn-sem representation is more complex than semelfactives. In the domain of complementizers, the book focuses on cross-categorial paradigms that include an unexpected morphological containment (in Russian), a degree of morphological complexity (in Latvian), and an ABA pattern of syncretic alignment (in Basaá), which we do not expect to find if syncretism is restricted to adjacent cells in a paradigm (cf. Bobaljik 2012). Analytically, the book focuses on the way the syntactic representations of these categories become realized as morphemes. In the general sense, then, this contribution belongs to a growing body of work that investigates the relation between syntactic structure and morphological form, understood as the amount of morphemes and their placement – in particular the prefix vs. suffix opposition. More specifically, however, the approach to lexicalization taken up in this book is informed by the results of research on syntax in the last quarter of a century, which show that syntactic representations are maximally fine-grained, the picture sometimes described as the “one feature per one syntactic head” dictum. Such a scenario has lead to the situation where syntactic representations can be submorphemic, in the sense that a lexical item corresponds to more than one syntactic head, a strand of research that has become known as Nanosyntax. This book investigates the state-of-art methodology of Nanosyntax in resolving the selected empirical problems in the domain of Slavic verbs and declarative complementizers, the problems that all appear to boil down to the way syntactic representations become realized as morphemes

Context-sensitive interpretation of natural language location descriptions : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy in Information Technology at Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand

People frequently describe the locations of objects using natural language. Location descriptions may be either structured, such as 26 Victoria Street, Auckland, or unstructured. Relative location descriptions (e.g., building near Sky Tower) are a common form of unstructured location description, and use qualitative terms to describe the location of one object relative to another (e.g., near, close to, in, next to). Understanding the meaning of these terms is easy for humans, but much more difficult for machines since the terms are inherently vague and context sensitive. In this thesis, we study the semantics (or meaning) of qualitative, geospatial relation terms, specifically geospatial prepositions. Prepositions are one of the most common forms of geospatial relation term, and they are commonly used to describe the location of objects in the geographic (geospatial) environment, such as rivers, mountains, buildings, and towns. A thorough understanding of the semantics of geospatial relation terms is important because it enables more accurate automated georeferencing of text location descriptions than use of place names only. Location descriptions that use geospatial prepositions are found in social media, web sites, blogs, and academic reports, and georeferencing can allow mapping of health, disaster and biological data that is currently inaccessible to the public. Such descriptions have unstructured format, so, their analysis is not straightforward. The specific research questions that we address are: RQ1. Which geospatial prepositions (or groups of prepositions) and senses are semantically similar? RQ2. Is the role of context important in the interpretation of location descriptions? RQ3. Is the object distance associated with geospatial prepositions across a range of geospatial scenes and scales accurately predictable using machine learning methods? RQ4. Is human annotation a reliable form of annotation for the analysis of location descriptions? To address RQ1, we determine the nature and degree of similarity among geospatial prepositions by analysing data collected with a human subjects experiment, using clustering, extensional mapping and t-stochastic neighbour embedding (t-SNE) plots to form a semantic similarity matrix. In addition to calculating similarity scores among prepositions, we identify the senses of three groups of geospatial prepositions using Venn diagrams, t-sne plots and density-based clustering, and define the relationships between the senses. Furthermore, we use two text mining approaches to identify the degree of similarity among geospatial prepositions: bag of words and GloVe embeddings. By using these methods and further analysis, we identify semantically similar groups of geospatial prepositions including: 1- beside, close to, near, next to, outside and adjacent to; 2- across, over and through and 3- beyond, past, by and off. The prepositions within these groups also share senses. Through is recognised as a specialisation of both across and over. Proximity and adjacency prepositions also have similar senses that express orientation and overlapping relations. Past, off and by share a proximal sense but beyond has a different sense from these, representing on the other side. Another finding is the more frequent use of the preposition close to for pairs of linear objects than near, which is used more frequently for non-linear ones. Also, next to is used to describe proximity more than touching (in contrast to other prepositions like adjacent to). Our application of text mining to identify semantically similar prepositions confirms that a geospatial corpus (NCGL) provides a better representation of the semantics of geospatial prepositions than a general corpus. Also, we found that GloVe embeddings provide adequate semantic similarity measures for more specialised geospatial prepositions, but less so for those that have more generalised applications and multiple senses. We explore the role of context (RQ2) by studying three sites that vary in size, nature, and context in London: Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace, and Hyde Park. We use the Google search engine to extract location descriptions that contain these three sites with 9 different geospatial prepositions (in, on, at, next to, close to, adjacent to, near, beside, outside) and calculate their acceptance profiles (the profile of the use of a preposition at different distances from the reference object) and acceptance thresholds (maximum distance from a reference object at which a preposition can acceptably be used). We use these to compare prepositions, and to explore the influence of different contexts. Our results show that near, in and outside are used for larger distances, while beside, adjacent to and at are used for smaller distances. Also, the acceptance threshold for close to is higher than for other proximity/adjacency prepositions such as next to, adjacent to and beside. The acceptance threshold of next to is larger than adjacent to, which confirms the findings in ‎Chapter 2 which identifies next to describing a proximity rather than touching spatial relation. We also found that relatum characteristics such as image schema affect the use of prepositions such as in, on and at. We address RQ3 by developing a machine learning regression model (using the SMOReg algorithm) to predict the distance associated with use of geospatial prepositions in specific expressions. We incorporate a wide range of input variables including the similarity matrix of geospatial prepositions (RQ1); preposition senses; semantic information in the form of embeddings; characteristics of the located and reference objects in the expression including their liquidity/solidity, scale and geometry type and contextual factors such as the density of features of different types in the surrounding area. We evaluate the model on two different datasets with 25% improvement against the best baseline respectively. Finally, we consider the importance of annotation of geospatial location descriptions (RQ4). As annotated data is essential for the successful study of automated interpretation of natural language descriptions, we study the impact and accuracy of human annotation on different geospatial elements. Agreement scores show that human annotators can annotate geospatial relation terms (e.g., geospatial prepositions) with higher agreement than other geospatial elements. This thesis advances understanding of the semantics of geospatial prepositions, particularly considering their semantic similarity and the impact of context on their interpretation. We quantify the semantic similarity of a set of 24 geospatial prepositions; identify senses and the relationships among them for 13 geospatial prepositions; compare the acceptance thresholds of 9 geospatial prepositions and describe the influence of context on them; and demonstrate that richer semantic and contextual information can be incorporated in predictive models to interpret relative geospatial location descriptions more accurately

Slavic verbs and complementizers

Empirically, the book covers two areas: the morphosyntax of verbs and categories syncretic with the declarative complementizer in Slavic, together with a comparative look at the similar categories in Latvian (Baltic) and Basaá (Bantu). In the domain of verbs, the book investigates a curious instance of analytic vs. fusional realization of grammatical categories that we find in a semelfactive-iterative alternation in Czech and Polish, where a semelfactive verb stem such as in the Czech kop-n-ou-t ‘give a kick’ alternates with an iterative verb stem as in kop-a-t ‘kick repeatedly’. The iterative -aj stem is morphologi cally less complex than the semelfactive stem formed with the -n-ou sequence, which is paradoxical given an analysis of iteratives as categories whose syn-sem representation is more complex than semelfactives. In the domain of complementizers, the book focuses on cross-categorial paradigms that include an unexpected morphological containment (in Russian), a degree of morphological complexity (in Latvian), and an ABA pattern of syncretic alignment (in Basaá), which we do not expect to find if syncretism is restricted to adjacent cells in a paradigm (cf. Bobaljik 2012). Analytically, the book focuses on the way the syntactic representations of these categories become realized as morphemes. In the general sense, then, this contribution belongs to a growing body of work that investigates the relation between syntactic structure and morphological form, understood as the amount of morphemes and their placement – in particular the prefix vs. suffix opposition. More specifically, however, the approach to lexicalization taken up in this book is informed by the results of research on syntax in the last quarter of a century, which show that syntactic representations are maximally fine-grained, the picture sometimes described as the “one feature per one syntactic head” dictum. Such a scenario has lead to the situation where syntactic representations can be submorphemic, in the sense that a lexical item corresponds to more than one syntactic head, a strand of research that has become known as Nanosyntax. This book investigates the state-of-art methodology of Nanosyntax in resolving the selected empirical problems in the domain of Slavic verbs and declarative complementizers, the problems that all appear to boil down to the way syntactic representations become realized as morphemes

Toward a Cognitive Classical Linguistics

Building on the momentum enjoyed by cognitive-functional approaches within Classics, this volume gathers a series of papers that bring the study of grammatical and syntactic constructions in both Greek and Latin under the perspective of theories developed in cognitive linguistics, revealing the role of human embodiment in determining the meanings of various linguistic phenomena