Notes on computational linguistics.pdf - UCLA Department of ...

Stabler - Lx 185/209 2003
(8) The previous lexicon allows us to derive both maria make -s tortillas and tortillas make -s
maria, aswellaswhat maria make -s. The-s is only appropriate when the subject is third singular,
but in this grammar, maria and tortillas have identical syntactic features. In particular, the feature
-k which is checked by the inflection is identical for these two words, even though they differ in number.
We can fix this easily. Again, going for just a simple fix first, for illustrative purposes, the following
does the trick:
ɛ::=i +wh c
ɛ::=i c
-s::=pred +v +k3s i ɛ::=pred +v +k i
-ed::=pred +v +k3s i -ed::=pred +v +k i
ɛ::=acc =d pred
ɛ::=v +k acc ɛ::=v +k3s acc
make::=d v -v
maria::d -k3s tortillas::d -k tortillas what::d -k3s -wh
With this grammar, we derive the tree shown on the previous page. In addition, we derive the tree
displayed below on the left; a structure which would have the more conventional depiction on the right:
<
cP
ɛ:c >
tortillas >
>
<
make
what <
ɛ:c >
maria >
<
make
<
>
<
>
maria <
<
-s >
And, as desired, we cannot derive:
* tortillas make -s maria
* what make tortillas
<
>
<
dP3
tortillas
dP1
what
dP3
cP
maria
c iP
c’
c iP
vP2
v
make
vP2
v
make
175
t1
t1
iP
iP
i
-s
i’
i predP
t3
i’
t3
pred’
pred accP
dP1
maria
predP
pred’
pred accP
t1
acc’
acc t2
acc’
acc t2