Beware Occam’s Syntactic Razor: Morphotactic Analysis and Spanish Mesoclisis

Harris and Halle (2005) present a framework (hereafter, Generalized Reduplication) that unites the treatment of phonological reduplication and metathesis with similar phenomena in morphology, thereby accounting for the apparently spurious placement of the imperative plural -n in mesoclitic Spanish forms such as hága-lo-n ‘Do it!’, in which clitic lo is sandwiched between the verbal stem and the plural suffix. Subsequently, Kayne (2010) has challenged their analysis, arguing that such cases should be treated purely within the syntax. In this paper, we reassess some of Kayne’s arguments, agreeing with his conclusion that the most important desiderata of any general analysis of these sorts of phenomena is restrictiveness. However, we contend that greater restrictiveness can be achieved through morphotactic constraints and repairs in the Generalized Reduplication formalism, triggered by a Noninitiality condition on the positioning of the plural affix, and develop a set of conditions on these operations that situate the locus of interspeaker variation within the postsyntactic component

Egilea:

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An Intelligent Dictionary Help System

This work discusses different issues on the construction and knowledge representation of an intelligent dictionary help system. IDHS (Intelligent Dictionary Help System) is conceived as a monolingual (explanatory) dictionary system for human use (1) (2) (3). The fact that it is intended for people instead of automatic processing distinguishes it from other systems dealing with the acquisition of semantic knowledge from conventional dictionaries. The system provides various access possibilities to the data, allowing to deduce implicit knowledge from the explicit dictionary information. IDHS deals with reasoning mechanisms analogous to those used by humans when they consult a dictionary. User level functionality of the system has been specified and a prototype has been implemented (4)

Conceptual Distance and Automatic Spelling Correction

. Text from different sources usually arrives under imperfect conditions. When an anomalous word is detected automatic word recognisers produce a list of candidates from which only one is correct. A variety of techniques have been devised to discriminate among the possible correction candidates. The project we are involved in tries to exploit linguistic knowledge in Spelling Correction. A preliminary investigation shows syntactic discrimination not to be enough. The gap could be covered by semantic techniques like conceptual distance. Basically, we define conceptual distance between two concepts as the shortest path length in the hierarchies of the lexical knowledge base of IDHS (Intelligent Dictionary Help System). We consider that a correction proposal that is closer to the surrounding words in the sentence is more plausible enabling us to produce a ranking of the proposals. It is our belief that conceptual distance can be also applied to other word recognition areas, such as handwri..