Permutational Grammar for free word order languages

Permutational Grammar, PG, is a grammar inspired by the Free Word Order grammar, FOG, presented in Vladimir Pericliev & Alexander Grigorov 1992. Some languages, notably Latin, are said to have free word order, see e.g. Siewierska 1988. The name Permutational Grammar is derived from the use of permutations in order to generate order variation. The general problem to be solved by FOG and PG is the generation and analysis of a great number of word order variants with (roughly) the same meaning. PG accomplishes this by specifying some basic phrase structure orders with their functional (and semantic) representations, and then permuting the corresponding sequences of constituents to obtain all the other sequences with the same meaning. Permutational Grammar can be regarded as a generative phrase structure grammar with transformations represented by permutations. It is developed from SWETRA grammar (see Sigurd 1994). The constituent parsing trees are not represented explicitly. PG is written with generative rewrite rules and implemented in Prolog via the Definite Clause Grammar (DCG) formalism. The Prolog implementation used here is LPAProlog. The rules state that permutations of the constituents to the right of the rewrite symbol have the functional representation given as an argument to the left of the rewrite symbol. These rewrite rules can be compiled into rules that generate all possible permutations of the basic word order ‘on the fly’. It is possible to apply constraints to the permutations generated. One may, for example, introduce an order constraint like imbefore(C1,C2,M), which states that a constituent matching the description C1 must occur immediately before another constituent matching C2 in the list of constituents M. Another example is last(C,M), which states that a C must occur last in the list

Describing Sensory Experience: The Genre of Wine Reviews

The purpose of the article is to shed light on how experiences of sensory perceptions in the domains of VISION, SMELL, TASTE and TOUCH are recast into text and discourse in the genre of wine reviews. Because of the alleged paucity of sensory vocabularies, in particular in the olfactory domain, it is of particular interest to investigate what resources language has to offer in order to describe those experiences. We show that the main resources are, on the one hand, words evoking properties that are applicable cross-modally and properties of objects that range over more than one domain, and on the other, vivid imagery that compares the characteristics of the wine with people, building, animals and the hustle and bustle of market places and other events. The second goal is to account for the construals of the meanings of the expressions used in the recontextualization into written discourse in the light of their apparent flexibility across the descriptions of the sensory experiences. In contrast to a large body of the literature on sensory meanings in language, we argue that the descriptors of properties such as sharp, soft, lemon and cherry used to describe a wine’s qualities across the sensory domains are not polysemous synesthetic metaphors, but monosemous synesthetic metonymizations, more precisely zone activations. With regard to the imagery used, the construals represented cover both similes, metaphorizations and metonymizations proper

Analogical morphology is undecidable

A certain formalization of Analogical Morphology is shown to be undecidable by reduction of Post's Correspondence Problem

Prolog Implementations of English and Swedish GB Grammars

Introduction and abstract Government and Binding theory (Chomsky 1981, Sells 1985) plays a dominant role in current linguistics and is an almost compulsory part of the linguistics curriculum at universities. The advantage of GB is its rigorous theory, allowing only certain simple trees and transformations, supple-mented by certain simple principles and constraints. The GB approach makes it possible to characterize language in a simple way and to pinpoint the differences between languages as different settings of the parameters of the base structure, transformations and constraints. In spite of its dominance in linguistics, GB has a comparatively low status in computational linguistics, as is witnessed by the proceedings of COL1NG and ACL (for exceptions see References). Computational linguists instead favour competing theories such as Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar, or eclectic variants. There is, however, a demand for computer implementa-tions of GB for linguistic and pedagogical purposes. This paper presents an experimental Prolog (LPA MacProlog) implementation of the basic features of GB, including categorial base rules for deep structures (d-structures) and transformations for movements of tense, w/z-words, noun phrases, verbs and adverbs. The movements leave traces in the surface structure (s-structure) in accordance with current theory. Both the leaves (words) of the d-structure tree and the leaves of the s-structure tree can be projected as sentences, the s-structures with or without traces. Sentences can be generated from the d-structure through the transformations or parsed by finding the d-structure after running the transformations in reverse. The English and Swedish grammars differ, as the English auxiliaries are generated in the tense slot (infl) and not is a barrier in English. Furthermore, Swedish moves all finite verbs to the second (comp) position, which is done only in questions in English, e.g. Whom did Bill like? The paper also shows how the grammars can be used for machine translation, handling differences in the d-structure by transfer rules

Modets växlingar hos förnamn i Norden

Thanks to name statistics published by the national bureaus of statistics in Scan­dinavia it is possible to study the changing popularity of first names. This paper is based on statistics from the years 1998-2002 in Sweden, 1998-2000 in Finland and 1880-2000 in Norway. The rise and fall in popularity — and in some cases renaissance — of individual names are shown and analyzed.It is observed that out of the 30 most common names generally 26 to 29 names remain in the lists each year. It is then possible to calculate the theoretical num­ber of names remaining after 2 years, 3 years, etc. using an exponential function (30*kAt), where k is a retention coefficient which for the 30 most common names varies between ca 0,90 and 0,97 (most conservative). This function makes it possible to estimate (although with uncertainty) how many years have elapsed between two lists on the basis of the number of common names.Some names reappear after about 120 years as is shown by the Norwegian data and one may suggest a theoretical model based on successive sinus curves with a period of ca 120. The frequency development of the individual names, however, often show a curve with a fast rise followed by a slow fall. Such curves can be approximated by a frequency function based on the gamma distribution (see Sigurd, Eeg-Olofsson & van de Weijer, 2004) as we demonstrate

Modeling the changing popularity of names

The popularity of Norwegian first names 1880-2000 can be studied thanks to official Norwegian statistics. The most common curve shows a fast rise and slow fall, which can be approximated by a mathematical gamma function. The curve presumably reflects the parents' changing enthusiasm for at particular name