existence: semantics and syntax - Institut für Linguistik/Germanistik ...

TOWARDS ADYNAMIC ACCOUNT OF BE IN ENGLISH 23
Ty(t),Fo(Upset ′ (Mary ′ )(John ′ )), ♦
Ty(e),Fo(John ′ ) Ty(e → t),Fo(Upset ′ (Mary ′ ))
Ty(e),
Fo(Mary ′ )
Ty(e → e → t),
Fo(Upset ′ )
Figure 4. Completing a parse of John upset Mary
Syntactic processing will continue just in case the next word has a trigger of the
appropriate type, i.e. ?Ty(e), such as another proper noun like Mary, parsing which
will ensure that all terminal nodes are type and formula complete. The remaining
open type requirements on the predicate and propositional nodes are satisfied
through the process of COMPILING the tree through functional application over
types, yielding the completed tree in Figure 4. Since the tree has no remaining
requirements, the parse is successful and the input string accepted as well-formed
with the interpretation given.
It is important to note at this point that the tree representations in Figures 1
to 4 (and throughout) do not have nodes decorated by words but by the concepts
expressed by words. Order in the trees is, therefore, entirely irrelevant and an arbitrary
decision has been made to order trees in this paper so that arguments appear
to the left of their functors. The order of functors and arguments in Figure 4 thus
does not reflect string order (English is not SOV), because the trees represent only
the content expressed by the string, not any phrasal structure. Word order itself is
determined by properties of pointer movement within the content trees, interacting
with computational and lexical actions, induced by the words in the string in strict
linear sequence. In this way, Dynamic Syntax characterises the syntax of natural
languages as the process by which the (representation) of interpretative content of
a string of words uttered in context is progressively built up on a word-by-word
basis. 16
2.1. Left Dislocation
The driving force of the parsing process is thus the need to resolve requirements to
specify underspecified information, of which the most important is the requirement
16 See Cann et al. 2005b, chapters 1 and 2, for the conceptual underpinnings of the theory and its
technical apparatus.