A Processing Model for Free Word Order Languages

Like many verb-final languages, Germn displays considerable word-order freedom: there is no syntactic constraint on the ordering of the nominal arguments of a verb, as long as the verb remains in final position. This effect is referred to as ``scrambling'', and is interpreted in transformational frameworks as leftward movement of the arguments. Furthermore, arguments from an embedded clause may move out of their clause; this effect is referred to as ``long-distance scrambling''. While scrambling has recently received considerable attention in the syntactic literature, the status of long-distance scrambling has only rarely been addressed. The reason for this is the problematic status of the data: not only is long-distance scrambling highly dependent on pragmatic context, it also is strongly subject to degradation due to processing constraints. As in the case of center-embedding, it is not immediately clear whether to assume that observed unacceptability of highly complex sentences is due to grammatical restrictions, or whether we should assume that the competence grammar does not place any restrictions on scrambling (and that, therefore, all such sentences are in fact grammatical), and the unacceptability of some (or most) of the grammatically possible word orders is due to processing limitations. In this paper, we will argue for the second view by presenting a processing model for German.Comment: 23 pages, uuencoded compressed ps file. In {\em Perspectives on Sentence Processing}, C. Clifton, Jr., L. Frazier and K. Rayner, editors. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 199

Modelling discourse theory

Anaphora are hidden descriptions found in discourse, which refer to explicitly mentioned entities of the discourse e.g. Mary loves tennis, she plays everyday. Humans can expand anaphors into fuller descriptions with ease by using intuitive world knowledge, which links the anaphor with a suitable entity of the discourse. In the example above it is obvious to us that she may be expanded into, or refer to, the previously mentioned female entity Mary. As humans we do not allow she to refer to tennis, as intuitively we know that the female she must refer to another female entity. Modelling anaphora resolution or expansion is a difficult task as so much of what is communicated is implicit in discourse. This thesis investigates the historical development of existing methods of resolving anaphors within discourse, and aims at implementing one such mechanism using a small fragment of English

Surface Structure

Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) was originally advanced as a theory relating coordination and relativization. The claim was that these constructions can be analysed at the level of surface grammar, without rules of movement, deletion, passing of slash-features, or the syntactic empty category Wh-trace. Instead, CCG generalizes the notion of grammatical constituency to cover everything that can coordinate or result from extraction, via the use of a small number of operations which apply to adjacent lexically realised grammatical categories interpreted as functions

Parallel Natural Language Parsing: From Analysis to Speedup

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc

Types of scrambling in Korean syntax

This dissertation aims to deepen our understanding of free word order phenomena or "scrambling." It offers a unified approach to some fundamental limitations on scrambling both in clauses and in noun phrases of Korean. These would have been attributed to a headedness parameter in earlier syntactic theories but are problematic in more recent syntactic theories in the minimalist framework where such a parameter cannot be naturally stated. Korean scrambling has several limitations. It is blocked from preposing the verb. It does not commute noun phrases that bear the same Case, nor does it prepose the right member of a small clause. I argue that these descriptive generalizations follow from a single, elegant restriction: only semantically complete or 'saturated' constituents can scramble. My contention is that this restriction is part of Universal Grammar and should be an organizing principle of all natural languages. The universality of the restriction is challenged by scrambling phenomena in Turkish which have different properties than their Korean counterparts. This variation is explained by recognizing two types of scrambling distinguished by their landing site