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

Stabler - Lx 185/209 2003
In the simple grammar we are constructing here, we would also like to allow or simple DP adjuncts of DP.
These are the appositives, as in Titus, the king, laughs. The problem with these adjunction constructions is
that they contain two DPs, each of which has a case feature to be checked, even though the sentence has just
one case checker, namely the finite tense -s. This can be handled if we allow an element with the features D
-k to combine with another element having those same features, to yield one (not two) elements with those
features. We represent this as follows:
D -k«D -k.
It is not hard to extend our grammar to use adjunction possibilities specified in this format.
In the framework that allows head movement, we need rules like this:
ss,sh,sc · fγ,α1,...,αk
ts,th,tc · gην, ι1,...,ιl
ssshscts,th,tc : gην, α1,...,αk,ι1,...,ιl
ss,sh,sc · fγ,α1,...,αk
ts,th,tc · gην, ι1,...,ιl
ss,sh,sctsthtc : gην, α1,...,αk,ι1,...,ιl
left-adjoin1: if fγ»gη
right-adjoin1: if gη«fγ
And we have two other rules for the situations where the modifier is moving, so that its string components are
not concatenated with anything yet. For non-empty δ:
ss,sh,sc · fγδ,α1,...,αk
ts,th,tc · gην, ι1,...,ιl
ts,th,tc : gην, ss,sh,sc :: δ, α1,...,αk,ι1,...,ιl
ss,sh,sc · fγδ,α1,...,αk
ts,th,tc · gην, ι1,...,ιl
ts,th,tc : gην, ss,sh,sc :: δ, α1,...,αk,ι1,...,ιl
left-adjoin2: if fγ»gη
right-adjoin1: if gη«fγ
Notice that the domains of left-adjoin1 and left-adjoin2 are disjoint, so their union is a function which we can
call left-adjoin. And similarly for right-adjoin. And noticethatwehaveorderedtheargumentstoallthese
functions so that the modifier appears as the first argument, even when it is adjoined to the right, in analogy
with the merge rules which always have the selector first.
EXAMPLES
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