Syntactic identity, Parallelism and accommodated antecedents

Analyses of the ellipsis identity condition must account for the fact that some syntactic mismatches between an ellipsis site E and its antecedent A are possible while others are not. Previous accounts have suggested that the relevant distinction is between different kinds of heads, such that some heads in the ellipsis site may mismatch while others may not, and they have dealt with this sensitivity to a set of “special heads” with a built-for-purpose syntactic identity condition which holds over and above semantic identity to constrain ellipsis. In this article I argue against this approach and pursue an alternative which holds that identity is syntactic but “loose” in a precisely defined way. I show that the relevant generalization that accounts for syntactic identity effects in sluicing and VP-ellipsis-like constructions concerns the position of variables in the antecedent, rather than the feature content of syntactic heads. I propose an implementation of syntactic identity which allows for the accommodation of additional antecedents, with these being derived by a grammatical algorithm for generating alternatives, and I show that this implementation derives the right kinds of looseness while restricting mismatches with respect to the position of variables, thus deriving both the tolerable and intolerable mismatches between E and A without recourse to a specific condition regulating the content of special heads

Antonyms as lexical constructions: or, why paradigmatic construction is not an oxymoron

This paper argues that antonymy is a syntagmatic as well as a paradigmatic relation, and that antonym pairs constitute a particular type of construction. This position relies on three observations about antonymy in discourse: (1) antonyms tend to co-occur in sentences, (2) they tend to co-occur in particular contrastive constructions, and (3) unlike other paradigmatic relations, antonymy is lexical as well as semantic in nature. CxG offers a means to treat both the contrastive constructions and conventionalised antonym pairings as linguistic constructions, thus providing an account of how semantically paradigmatic relations come to be syntagmatically realised as well. After reviewing the relevant characteristics of CxG, it looks at some of the phrasal contexts in which antonyms tend to co-occur and argues that at least some of these constitute constructions with contrastive import. It then sketches a new type of discontinuous lexical construction that treats antonym pairs as lexical items, and raises issues for further discussion

Robust Processing of Natural Language

Previous approaches to robustness in natural language processing usually treat deviant input by relaxing grammatical constraints whenever a successful analysis cannot be provided by ``normal'' means. This schema implies, that error detection always comes prior to error handling, a behaviour which hardly can compete with its human model, where many erroneous situations are treated without even noticing them. The paper analyses the necessary preconditions for achieving a higher degree of robustness in natural language processing and suggests a quite different approach based on a procedure for structural disambiguation. It not only offers the possibility to cope with robustness issues in a more natural way but eventually might be suited to accommodate quite different aspects of robust behaviour within a single framework.Comment: 16 pages, LaTeX, uses pstricks.sty, pstricks.tex, pstricks.pro, pst-node.sty, pst-node.tex, pst-node.pro. To appear in: Proc. KI-95, 19th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Bielefeld (Germany), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer 199

An overview of the ciao multiparadigm language and program development environment and its design philosophy

We describe some of the novel aspects and motivations behind the design and implementation of the Ciao multiparadigm programming system. An important aspect of Ciao is that it provides the programmer with a large number of useful features from different programming paradigms and styles, and that the use of each of these features can be turned on and off at will for each program module. Thus, a given module may be using e.g. higher order functions and constraints, while another module may be using objects, predicates, and concurrency. Furthermore, the language is designed to be extensible in a simple and modular way. Another important aspect of Ciao is its programming environment, which provides a powerful preprocessor (with an associated assertion language) capable of statically finding non-trivial bugs, verifying that programs comply with specifications, and performing many types of program optimizations. Such optimizations produce code that is highly competitive with other dynamic languages or, when the highest levéis of optimization are used, even that of static languages, all while retaining the interactive development environment of a dynamic language. The environment also includes a powerful auto-documenter. The paper provides an informal overview of the language and program development environment. It aims at illustrating the design philosophy rather than at being exhaustive, which would be impossible in the format of a paper, pointing instead to the existing literature on the system

Symmetric and asymmetric relations, and the aesthetics of form in poetic language

This article asks how the properties of symmetry and asymmetry, as aesthetic properties, are realized in literary language. I will argue that language makes available many kinds of asymmetry, and that the asymmetry often holds between two elements which are at the same time in a symmetric relation. This coincidence of an asymmetric and a symmetric relation between the same linguistic elements may be one source of the aesthetics of literary language

Scaling language competition in a small island state : graphic verbs in Seychellois Creole and English

One of the sensitive aspects of a small country is the predicament of its language. Seychellois Creole, one of that country`s three official languages and the native language of its Creole population, is asserting its linguistic identity against the globally-established English and French, the other two official languages of the country. How resilient is Seychellois Creole in this language triangle? Are the challenges it faces related to the small number of speakers, citizens of the small country? To what extent, and in what particular way, does Seychellois Creole vulnerable position, as a small language neighboured by two international languages, affect its development? These questions are approached in this paper by means of the comparative analysis of some linguistic parameters of Seychellois Creole and English. Research has been carried out with a group of English and Seychellois Creole verbs conceptualizing the process of graphic representation. The paper focuses on the capacity of the two contrasted languages for concept lexicalisation, patterns of semantic development and syntactic shifting.peer-reviewe