Interactions between Constraints and Constructions in Negation and Inversion Phenomena

Observations of real language use and language processing tell us that we parse our language in an integrated, order independent, and incremental manner. The grammar that reflects these robust properties would be one whose theoretical constructs are declarative constraints (cf. Pollard and Sag 1994). In addition, the fact that a given word or phrase must be used in special grammatical constructions with specific meanings (e.g., resultatives, way constructions, WXDY constructions and the like) provides enough reason for the supposition of constructions as primitives in the grammar (Goldberg 1995, Kay 1997) This paper is an attempt to adopt the notion of constructions within a constraint-based grammar framework, HPSG (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar). Within the mechanism of multiple inheritance hierarchy in HPSG, each construction has its own properties but is linked to other constructions. This system enables us to minimize the specifications on the properties of each construction and capture the generalizations across constructions. In particular, tight interactions between constraints and constructions make it unnecessary to introduce abstract, invisible traces. The parer shows that when applying this system to the analysis of auxiliary sensitive constructions such as negation and inversion, we can provide a cleaner grammar with simpler syntactic structures without resorting to unmotivated, additional mechanisms

A constraint-based approach to Korean auxiliary constructions and its computational implementation

Korean auxiliary constructions are the most widely used constructions in the language. A theoretically and computationally feasible grammar of these constructions is thus a prerequisite to the successful development of any syntactic and semantic analyzers. This paper reviews some basic properties of these constructions and briefly discusses the merits of treating these constructions as a type of complex predicate. The paper then sketches this analysis within the framework of constraint-based grammar of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), the grammar which models human languages as systems of typed feature structures. Based on these empirical and theoretical observations, to test the efficiency of the grammar in a computational perspective, we implement this complex-predicate analysis into the Linguistic Knowledge Building (LKB) system, a grammar and lexicon development environment for use with constraint-based linguistic formalisms such as HPSG (cf. Coopstake, 2002). The result of this research proves that a constraint-based grammar wíth mathematically and precisely well-defined type-hierarchy systems can provide us plausible and efficient ways of building a theoretically sound, empirically proper, and computationally tractable Korean gramma