A corpus-based description of cleft constructions in Persian

Palancar, Enrique & Martine Vanhove (eds.)International audienceThis paper presents a corpus-based description of cleft constructions in Persian showing that they display more diversity and complexity than currently described in the literature. Previous studies have only focused on constructions that echo one of the three main classes of clefts (IT-clefts, pseudoclefts and reversed pseudoclefts), and generally use Persian data in parallel to their English counterparts in order to contribute to the ongoing theoretical debates on the analysis of clefts. In order to achieve a more accurate picture of Persian clefts, we annotated and studied cleft and cleft-like sentences in a sample of about 550 relative clauses extracted from a journalistic corpus. Our study revealed new categories of cleft constructions that have not been reported previously; in particular, the lexically headed pseudoclefts whose usage is straightforwardly linked to the abundance of noun-verb light verb constructions in Persian. Moreover, we take issue with some claims made in prior work on the nature of the demonstrative in in Persian IT-clefts based on empirical arguments

Introducing PersPred, a syntactic and semantic database for Persian Complex Predicates

International audienceThis paper introduces PersPred, the first manually elaborated syntactic and semantic database for Persian Complex Predicates (CPs). Beside their theoretical interest, Persian CPs constitute an important challenge in Persian lexicography and for NLP. The first delivery, PersPred 1, contains 700 CPs, for which 22 fields of lexical, syntactic and semantic information are encoded. The semantic classification PersPred provides allows to account for the productivity of these combinations in a way which does justice to their compositionality without overlooking their idiomaticity

La morphologie du pluriel nominal du persan d’après la théorie Whole Word Morphology

Ce mémoire présente une étude de la morphologie de ce qui est généralement appelé le pluriel nominal du persan (parler de Téhéran) dans le cadre d’une théorie de la morphologie basée sur le mot : Whole Word Morphology, développée par Ford et Singh (1991). Ce modèle lexicaliste adopte une position plus forte que les modèles proposés par Aronoff (1976) et Anderson (1992) en n’admettant aucune opération morphologique sur des unités plus petites que le mot. Selon cette théorie, une description morphologique consiste en l’énumération des Stratégies de Formation de Mots (SFM), licencées chacunes par au moins deux paires de mots ayant la même covariation formelle et sémantique. Tous les SFM suit le même schéma. Nous avons répertorié 49 SFM regroupant les pluriels et les collectifs. Nous constatons qu’il est difficile de saisir le pluriel nominal du persan en tant que catégorie syntaxique et que les différentes « marques du pluriel » présentées dans la littérature ne constituent pas un ensemble homogène : elles partagent toutes un sens de pluralité qui cependant varie d’une interprétation référentielle à une interprétation collective non-référentielle. Cette étude vise la déscription de la compétence morphologique, ce qui ne dépend d’aucune considération extralinguistique. Nous argumentons notamment contre la dichotomie arabe/persan généralement admise dans la littérature. Nous avons également fourni des explications quant à la production des pluriels doubles et avons discuté de la variation supposée du fait d’un choix multiple de « marques du pluriel ».This thesis presents a word-based study of what is generally called the nominal plural morphology of Persian (Tehrani dialect) within the framework of the Whole Word Morphology developed by Ford & Singh (1991). This lexicaliste model takes up a stronger position than that proposed by Aronoff (1976) and Anderson (1992), by not allowing any morphological operation on units smaller than the word. According to this theory a morphological description consist of the listing of the Word Formation Strategies (WFS), each licensed by at least two pairs of words having the same formal and semantic covariation. All WFS’s follow the same schema. We have listed 49 WFS’s of plurals and collectives. We note that it is difficult to understand the import of the plural nominal as a syntactic category in Persian and that different “marks of plural” presented in the literature do not make a homogeneous unity: they all share a plurality meaning but it varies from referential interpretation to collective and non-referential interpretation. This study’s aim is to describe the morphological competence, which does not depend on any extra-linguistic criteria. In particular, we argue against the generally admitted Arabic/Persian dichotomy. We also provide explanation with regards to the utterance of double plurals and to the variation assumed since more than one choice of “plural marks” are available

Re-thinking Compositionality in Persian Complex Predicates

BLS 39: General Session and Special Session on Space and Directionalit

A new morphological lexicon and a POS tagger for the Persian Language

International audienceIn (Sagot and Walther, 2010), the authors introduce an advanced tokenizer and a morpho- logical lexicon for the Persian language named PerLex. In this paper, we describe experiments dedicated to enriching this lexicon and using it for building a POS tagger for Persian

Développement de ressources pour le persan : le nouveau lexique morphologique PerLex 2 et l'étiqueteur morphosyntaxique MElt-fa

International audienceDans cet article nous présentons une nouvelle version de PerLex, lexique morphologique du persan, une version corrigée et partiellement réannotée du corpus étiqueté BijanKhan (BijanKhan, 2004) et MEltfa, un nouvel étiqueteur morphosyntaxique librement disponible pour le persan. Après avoir développé une première version de PerLex (Sagot & Walther, 2010), nous en proposons donc ici une version améliorée. Outre une validation manuelle partielle, PerLex 2 repose désormais sur un inventaire de catégories linguistiquement motivé. Nous avons également développé une nouvelle version du corpus BijanKhan : cette nouvelle version contient des corrections significatives de la tokenisation ainsi qu'un réétiquetage à l'aide des nouvelles catégories. Cette nouvelle version du corpus a enfin été utilisée pour l'entraînement de MEltfa, notre étiqueteur morphosyntaxique pour le persan librement disponible, s'appuyant à la fois sur ce nouvel inventaire de catégories, sur PerLex 2 et sur le système d'étiquetage MElt (Denis & Sagot, 2009)

One-to-many-relations in morphology, syntax, and semantics

The standard view of the form-meaning interfaces, as embraced by the great majority of contemporary grammatical frameworks, consists in the assumption that meaning can be associated with grammatical form in a one-to-one correspondence. Under this view, composition is quite straightforward, involving concatenation of form, paired with functional application in meaning. In this book, we discuss linguistic phenomena across several grammatical sub-modules (morphology, syntax, semantics) that apparently pose a problem to the standard view, mapping out the potential for deviation from the ideal of one-to-one correspondences, and develop formal accounts of the range of phenomena. We argue that a constraint-based perspective is particularly apt to accommodate deviations from one-to-many correspondences, as it allows us to impose constraints on full structures (such as a complete word or the interpretation of a full sentence) instead of deriving such structures step by step. Most of the papers in this volume are formulated in a particular constraint-based grammar framework, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The contributions investigate how the lexical and constructional aspects of this theory can be combined to provide an answer to this question across different linguistic sub-theories

One-to-many-relations in morphology, syntax, and semantics

The standard view of the form-meaning interfaces, as embraced by the great majority of contemporary grammatical frameworks, consists in the assumption that meaning can be associated with grammatical form in a one-to-one correspondence. Under this view, composition is quite straightforward, involving concatenation of form, paired with functional application in meaning. In this book, we discuss linguistic phenomena across several grammatical sub-modules (morphology, syntax, semantics) that apparently pose a problem to the standard view, mapping out the potential for deviation from the ideal of one-to-one correspondences, and develop formal accounts of the range of phenomena. We argue that a constraint-based perspective is particularly apt to accommodate deviations from one-to-many correspondences, as it allows us to impose constraints on full structures (such as a complete word or the interpretation of a full sentence) instead of deriving such structures step by step. Most of the papers in this volume are formulated in a particular constraint-based grammar framework, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The contributions investigate how the lexical and constructional aspects of this theory can be combined to provide an answer to this question across different linguistic sub-theories

One-to-many-relations in morphology, syntax, and semantics

The standard view of the form-meaning interfaces, as embraced by the great majority of contemporary grammatical frameworks, consists in the assumption that meaning can be associated with grammatical form in a one-to-one correspondence. Under this view, composition is quite straightforward, involving concatenation of form, paired with functional application in meaning. In this book, we discuss linguistic phenomena across several grammatical sub-modules (morphology, syntax, semantics) that apparently pose a problem to the standard view, mapping out the potential for deviation from the ideal of one-to-one correspondences, and develop formal accounts of the range of phenomena. We argue that a constraint-based perspective is particularly apt to accommodate deviations from one-to-many correspondences, as it allows us to impose constraints on full structures (such as a complete word or the interpretation of a full sentence) instead of deriving such structures step by step. Most of the papers in this volume are formulated in a particular constraint-based grammar framework, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The contributions investigate how the lexical and constructional aspects of this theory can be combined to provide an answer to this question across different linguistic sub-theories

One-to-many-relations in morphology, syntax, and semantics

The standard view of the form-meaning interfaces, as embraced by the great majority of contemporary grammatical frameworks, consists in the assumption that meaning can be associated with grammatical form in a one-to-one correspondence. Under this view, composition is quite straightforward, involving concatenation of form, paired with functional application in meaning. In this book, we discuss linguistic phenomena across several grammatical sub-modules (morphology, syntax, semantics) that apparently pose a problem to the standard view, mapping out the potential for deviation from the ideal of one-to-one correspondences, and develop formal accounts of the range of phenomena. We argue that a constraint-based perspective is particularly apt to accommodate deviations from one-to-many correspondences, as it allows us to impose constraints on full structures (such as a complete word or the interpretation of a full sentence) instead of deriving such structures step by step. Most of the papers in this volume are formulated in a particular constraint-based grammar framework, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The contributions investigate how the lexical and constructional aspects of this theory can be combined to provide an answer to this question across different linguistic sub-theories