Lexicalized non-local MCTAG with dominance links is NP-complete

An NP-hardness proof for non-local Multicomponent Tree Adjoining Grammar (MCTAG) by Rambow and Satta (1st International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammers 1992), based on Dahlhaus and Warmuth (in J Comput Syst Sci 33:456–472, 1986), is extended to some linguistically relevant restrictions of that formalism. It is found that there are NP-hard grammars among non-local MCTAGs even if any or all of the following restrictions are imposed: (i) lexicalization: every tree in the grammar contains a terminal; (ii) dominance links: every tree set contains at most two trees, and in every such tree set, there is a link between the foot node of one tree and the root node of the other tree, indicating that the former node must dominate the latter in the derived tree. This is the version of MCTAG proposed in Becker et al. (Proceedings of the 5th conference of the European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics 1991) to account for German long-distance scrambling. This result restricts the field of possible candidates for an extension of Tree Adjoining Grammar that would be both mildly context-sensitive and linguistically adequate

The interaction of compositional semantics and event semantics

Davidsonian event semantics is often taken to form an unhappy marriage with compositional semantics. For example, it has been claimed to be problematic for semantic accounts of quantification (Beaver and Condoravdi, in: Aloni et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the 16th Amsterdam Colloquium, 2007), for classical accounts of negation (Krifka, in: Bartsch et al. (eds.) Semantics and contextual expression, 1989), and for intersective accounts of verbal coordination (Lasersohn, in Plurality, conjunction and events, 1995). This paper shows that none of this is the case, once we abandon the idea that the event variable is bound at sentence level, and assume instead that verbs denote existential quantifiers over events. Quantificational arguments can then be given a semantic account, negation can be treated classically, and coordination can be modeled as intersection. The framework presented here is a natural choice for researchers and fieldworkers who wish to sketch a semantic analysis of a language without being forced to make commitments about the hierarchical order of arguments, the argument-adjunct distinction, the default scope of quantifiers, or the nature of negation and coordination

Binding theory in LTAG

This paper provides a unification-based implementation of Binding Theory (BT) for the English language in the framework of feature-based lexicalized tree-adjoining grammar (LTAG). The grammar presented here does not actually coindex any noun phrases, it merely outputs a set of constraints on co- and contraindexation that may later be processed by a separate anaphora resolution module. It improves on previous work by implementing the full BT rather than just Condition A. The main technical innovation consists in allowing lists to appear as values of semantic features

Donkeys under Discussion

Donkey sentences have existential and universal readings, but they are not often perceived as ambiguous. We extend the pragmatic theory of nonmaximality in plural definites by Križ (2016) to explain how context disambiguates donkey sentences. We propose that the denotations of such sentences produce truth-value gaps — in certain scenarios the sentences are neither true nor false — and demonstrate that Križ’s pragmatic theory fills these gaps to generate the standard judgments of the literature. Building on Muskens’s (1996) Compositional Discourse Representation Theory and on ideas from supervaluation semantics, the semantic analysis defines a general schema for quantification that delivers the required truth-value gaps. Given the independently motivated pragmatic theory of Križ 2016, we argue that mixed readings of donkey sentences require neither plural information states, contra Brasoveanu 2008, 2010, nor error states, contra Champollion 2016, nor singular donkey pronouns with plural referents, contra Krifka 1996, Yoon 1996. We also show that the pragmatic account improves over alternatives like Kanazawa 1994 that attribute the readings of donkey sentences to the monotonicity properties of the embedding quantifier

A unified account of distributivity, for-adverbials, and pseudopartitives

This paper presents a diagnostic for identifying distributive constructions and shows that it applies to pseudopartitives and for-adverbials. On this basis, a unified account is proposed for the parallels between the constructions involved. This account explains why for-adverbials reject telic predicates (*run to the store for five hours), why pseudopartitives reject count nouns (*five pounds of book), and why both reject certain measure functions like temperature and speed (*30 of water, *drive for 5 mph). These restrictions all follow from a general constraint on distributive constructions. Related concepts such as the D operator (Link, 1987), the subinterval property (Bennett and Partee, 1972), and divisive reference (Cheng, 1973) can be understood as formalizing special cases of this constraint

Breaking de Morgan's law in counterfactual antecedents

The main goal of this paper is to investigate the relation between the meaning of a sentence and its truth conditions. We report on a comprehension experiment on counterfactual conditionals, based on a context in which a light is controlled by two switches. Our main finding is that the truth-conditionally equivalent clauses (i) "switch A or switch B is down" and (ii) "switch A and switch B are not both up" make different semantic contributions when embedded in a conditional antecedent. Assuming compositionality, this means that (i) and (ii) differ in meaning, which implies that the meaning of a sentential clause cannot be identified with its truth conditions. We show that our data have a clear explanation in inquisitive semantics: in a conditional antecedent, (i) introduces two distinct assumptions, while (ii) introduces only one. Independently of the complications stemming from disjunctive antecedents, our results also challenge analyses of counterfactuals in terms of minimal change from the actual state of affairs: we show that such analyses cannot account for our findings, regardless of what changes are considered minimal

Rigid and flexible quantification in plural predicate logic

Noun phrases with overt determiners, such as \u3ci\u3esome apples\u3c/i\u3e or \u3ci\u3ea quantity of milk\u3c/i\u3e, differ from bare noun phrases like \u3ci\u3eapples\u3c/i\u3e or \u3ci\u3emilk\u3c/i\u3e in their contribution to aspectual composition. While this has been attributed to syntactic or algebraic properties of these noun phrases, such accounts have explanatory shortcomings. We suggest instead that the relevant property that distinguishes between the two classes of noun phrases derives from two modes of existential quantification, one of which holds the values of a variable fixed throughout a quantificational context while the other allows them to vary. Inspired by Dynamic Plural Logic and Dependence Logic, we propose Plural Predicate Logic as an extension of Predicate Logic to formalize this difference. We suggest that temporal \u3ci\u3efor\u3c/i\u3e-adverbials are sensitive to aspect because of the way they manipulate quantificational contexts, and that analogous manipulations occur with spatial \u3ci\u3efor\u3c/i\u3e-adverbials, habituals, and the quantifier \u3ci\u3eall\u3c/i\u3e

Move and accommodate: A solution to Haddock's puzzle

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Bidirectional dependency parsing trained on the Turin University Treebank

In this paper, we describe the application of a bidirectional dependency parser trained on the Turin University Treebank