The case of fragment answers

This paper investigates the case of bare-(pro)nominal fragment answers, and specifically the issues that arise in analyzing the case of fragment DPs from subject questions. I adopt a middle ground approach between competing theories of nonsententials—namely the Ellipsis Approach (Merchant 2004) and the approach of Direct Interpretation (Barton & Progovac 2005)—and propose fragment DPs to be derived from a null vP. For their case forms, I compare two different theories of case—assignment by functional heads and Dependent Case Theory—and hypothesize that fragment DPs construed as the internal argument are realized in dependent case for nominative-accusative languages. Fragment DPs construed as the external argument would be found in their default case form, which is language-specific. Fragment answer data from English, Korean, and Serbian is used to provide crosslinguistic support for this null vP analysis and discussion of case

Syntactic Category Learning as Iterative Prototype-Driven Clustering

We lay out a model for minimally supervised syntactic category acquisition which combines concepts from standard NLP part-of-speech tagging applications with cognitively motivated distributional statistics. The model assumes a small set of seed words (Haghighi and Klein, 2006), an approach with motivation in (Pinker, 1984)’s semantic bootstrapping hypothesis, and repeatedly constructs hierarchical agglomerative clusterings over a growing lexicon. Clustering is performed on the basis of word-adjacent syntactic frames alone (Mintz, 2003) with no reference to word-internal features, which has been shown to yield qualitatively coherent POS clusters (Redington et al., 1998). A prototype-driven labeling process based on tree-distance yields results comparable to unsupervised algorithms based on complex statistical optimization while maintaining its cognitive underpinnings