Lessons from the English auxiliary system

The English auxiliary system exhibits many lexical exceptions and subregularities, and considerable dialectal variation, all of which are frequently omitted from generative analyses and discussions. This paper presents a detailed, movement-free account of the English Auxiliary System within Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2010, Michaelis 2011, Boas & Sag 2012) that utilizes techniques of lexicalist and construction-based analysis. The resulting conception of linguistic knowledge involves constraints that license hierarchical structures directly (as in context-free grammar), rather than by appeal to mappings over such structures. This allows English auxiliaries to be modeled as a class of verbs whose behavior is governed by general and class-specific constraints. Central to this account is a novel use of the feature aux, which is set both constructionally and lexically, allowing for a complex interplay between various grammatical constraints that captures a wide range of exceptional patterns, most notably the vexing distribution of unstressed do, and the fact that Ellipsis can interact with other aspects of the analysis to produce the feeding and blocking relations that are needed to generate the complex facts of EAS. The present approach, superior both descriptively and theoretically to existing transformational approaches, also serves to undermine views of the biology of language and acquisition such as Berwick et al. (2011), which are centered on mappings that manipulate hierarchical phrase structures in a structure-dependent fashion

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Learning Lambek grammars from proof frames

A revised version will appear in a volume in honour of Lambek 90th birthdayInternational audienceIn addition to their limpid interface with semantics, categorial grammars enjoy another important property: learnability. This was first noticed by Buskowsky and Penn and further studied by Kanazawa, for Bar-Hillel categorial grammars. What about Lambek categorial grammars? In a previous paper we showed that product free Lambek grammars where learnable from structured sentences, the structures being incomplete natural deductions. These grammars were shown to be unlearnable from strings by Foret and Le Nir. In the present paper we show that Lambek grammars, possibly with product, are learnable from proof frames that are incomplete proof nets. After a short reminder on grammatical inference á la Gold, we provide an algorithm that learns Lambek grammars with product from proof frames and we prove its convergence. We do so for 1-valued also known as rigid Lambek grammars with product, since standard techniques can extend our result to $k$-valued grammars. Because of the correspondence between cut-free proof nets and normal natural deductions, our initial result on product free Lambek grammars can be recovered. We are sad to dedicate the present paper to Philippe Darondeau, with whom we started to study such questions in Rennes at the beginning of the millennium, and who passed away prematurely. We are glad to dedicate the present paper to Jim Lambek for his 90 birthday: he is the living proof that research is an eternal learning process

Indeterminacy, complex features and underspecification

At its simplest, morphosyntactic agreement may be viewed as involving linguistic objects which have the same values for a given feature. In contemporary constraint-based formalisms the relationship is usually modelled by structure sharing in the syntax; for predicate-argument agreement, most often it is assumed that the target and the controller provide compatible (complete or partial) specifications of features of the controller. This approach has much to recommend it, being based on the straightforward mechanism of combining information monotonically in the syntax. Additionally, it is often (but not invariably) assumed that (a subset of) these same morphosyntactic features are simply passed down to the morphology for spell out (Bresnan, In: Baltin and Collins (eds.) Handbook of contemporary syntactic theory, 2000; Lexical functional syntax, 2001) (but see e. g. Ackerman and Webelhuth (In: Butt and King (eds.) Online proceedings of the LFG96 conference, 1996); Sadler and Spencer (Yearbook of morphology 2002:71-97, 2001); Sells (In: Sadler and Spencer (eds.) Projecting morphology, 2004; In: Nikolaeva (ed.) Finiteness: theoretical and empirical foundations, 2007); Sadler and Nordlinger (In: Sadler and Spencer (eds.) Projecting morphology, 2004); Hinrichs and Nakazawa (Proceedings of HPSG2001, 2002) for approaches in lfg and other constraint-based formalisms which allow some further separation between these components). We discuss a range of cases of morphosyntactic agreement which are challenging in one way or another to this lean approach and explore how they may be modelled without adding any extra machinery, by using underspecified feature representations in the syntax, within one such framework, that of Lexical Functional Grammar lfg. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V