Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 9 (EISS 9 ... - CSSP - CNRS

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semantic representation and computation. Since elementary trees are the basic syntactic building blocks, it is possible to assign complex semantic representations to them without necessarily deriving these representations compositionally from smaller parts of the tree. Hence, there is no need to reproduce the internal structure of an elementary syntactic tree within its associated semantic representation (Kallmeyer & Joshi 2003). In particular, one can employ ‘flat’ semantic representations along the lines of Copestake et al. (2005). This approach, which supports the underspecified representation of scope ambiguities, has been taken up in LTAG models of quantifier scope and adjunction phenomena (Kallmeyer & Joshi 2003; Gardent & Kallmeyer 2003; Kallmeyer & Romero 2008). The fact that elementary trees can directly be combined with semantic representations allows for a straightforward treatment of idiomatic expressions and other non-compositional phenomena, much in the way proposed in Construction Grammar. The downside of this ‘complicate locally’ perspective is that it is more or less unconcerned about the nature of the linguistic constraints encoded by elementary trees and about their underlying regularities. In fact, a good part of the linguistic investigations of the syntax-semantics interface are concerned with argument realization, including argument extension and alternation phenomena (e.g. Van Valin 2005; Levin & Rappaport Hovav 2005; Müller 2006). Simply enumerating all possible realization patterns in terms of elementary trees without exploring the underlying universal and language-specific regularities would be rather unsatisfying from a linguistic point of view. The mere enumeration of basic constructional patterns is also problematic from the practical perspective of grammar engineering (Xia et al. 2010): The lack of generalization gives rise to redundancy since the components shared by different elementary trees are not recognized as such. This leads to maintenance issues and increases the danger of inconsistencies. A common strategy to overcome these problems is to introduce a tree description language which allows one to specify sets of elementary trees in a systematic and non-redundant way (e.g. Candito 1999; Xia 2001). The linguistic regularities and generalizations of natural languages are then captured on the level of descriptions. Since LTAG regards elementary trees as the basic components of grammar, the system of tree descriptions is often referred to as the metagrammar. While the details of the approaches of Candito (1999) and Xia (2001) differ, they both assume canonical or base trees from which alternative constructions are derived by a system of lexical and syntactic rules. Crabbé (2005), by contrast, proposes a purely constraint-based approach to metagrammatical specification (see also Crabbé & Duchier 2005), which does not presume a principle distinction between canonical and derived patterns but generates elementary trees uniformly as minimal models of metagrammatical descriptions. We will adopt the latter approach for our framework because of its clear-cut distinction between the declarative level of grammatical specification and procedural and algorithmic aspects related to the generation of the elementary trees. Existing metagrammatical approaches in LTAG are primarily concerned with the organization of general valency templates and with syntactic phenomena such as passivization and wh-extraction. The semantic side has not been given much attention up to now. However, there are also important semantic regularities and generalizations to be captured within the domain of elementary constructions. In addition to general semantic constraints on the realization of arguments, this includes also the more specific semantic conditions and effects that go along with argument extension and modification constructions such as resultative and applicative constructions, among others. In order to capture phenomena of this type, the metagrammatical descriptions need to include semantic constraints as well. In other words, analyzing the syntaxsemantics interface given by elementary constructions that goes beyond the mere enumeration 168
NP VP John Adv obviously S NP VP V NP VP ∗ likes NP spaghetti derived tree: S NP VP John Adv VP obviously V NP likes spaghetti Figure 1: A sample derivation in TAG of form-meaning pairs calls for a (meta)grammatical system of constraints consisting of, both, syntactic and semantic components. It must be emphasized that this conclusion does not imply a revival of the idea of a direct correspondence between syntactic and semantic (sub)structures, an assumption which LTAG has abandoned for good reasons. The framework proposed in this paper treats the syntactic and the semantic components of elementary constructions as structured entities, trees, on the hand, and frames, on the other hand, without requiring that there be any structural isomorphism between them. The metagrammar specifies the syntactic and semantic properties of constructional fragments and defines how they can combine to larger constructional fragments. There is no need for a structural isomorphism between syntax and semantics simply because the relation between the syntactic and semantic components is explicitly specified. Below we illustrate this program of decomposing syntactic trees and semantic frames in the metagrammar by a case study of the dative alternation in English, which is is well-known to be sensitive to lexical and constructional meaning components. A long-term goal of the work described in this paper is the development of a grammar engineering framework that allows a seamless integration of lexical and constructional semantics. More specifically, the approach provides Tree Adjoining Grammars with a decompositional lexical and constructional semantics and thereby complements existing proposals which are focused on standard sentence semantics. From a wider perspective, the framework can be seen as a step towards a formal and computational account of some key ideas of Construction Grammar à la Goldberg, since the elementary trees of LTAG combined with semantic frames come close to what is regarded as a construction in such approaches. Frameworks with similar goals are Embodied Construction Grammar (Bergen & Chang 2005) and Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2012). 2. LTAG and grammatical factorization 2.1. Brief introduction to TAG Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG; Joshi & Schabes 1997; Abeillé & Rambow 2000) is a treerewriting formalism. A TAG consists of a finite set of elementary trees. The nodes of these trees are labelled with non-terminal and terminal symbols, with terminals restricted to leaf nodes. Starting from the elementary trees, larger trees are derived by substitution (replacing a leaf with a new tree) and adjunction (replacing an internal node with a new tree). Sample elementary trees and a derivation are shown in Fig. 1. In this derivation, the elementary trees for John and spaghetti substitute into the subject and the object slot of the elementary tree for likes, and the obviously modifier tree adjoins to the VP node. 169
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EISS 9 Empirical Issues in Syntax a
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Contents Preface v Valentina Bianch
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Preface The ninth volume of the ser
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contexts; we provide experimental e
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which we included random intercepts
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• Locality condition: The proposi
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[[(1B′)]] f = {invite(john, x) |
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focus projection, and require that
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The term ‘root clause’ was intr
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pared the degree of metrical promin
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Focus in situ + negative tag Focus
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Horvath, Julia. 2010. “Discourse-
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languages: Hungarian (H) and Romani
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attach-wh usually licenses a single
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on’ requires an overt preposition
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of syntactic priming: the stricter
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(43) Nu văd cum și, mai important
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for certain values to be identical
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ing the CNJ-LST proposed for coordi
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oth of these cases, as well as the
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References Abeillé, Anne. 2005. Le
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the addressee by virtue of linguist
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dressee is enticed by the imperativ
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some way. She notes that it is not
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. A: Give me an aspirin! B: # I don
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Effective preference structures can
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the content gets realized (i.e. he
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to the principle in (39), which aim
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Kaufmann follows the second strateg
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5. Portner 2005, 2007: a dedicated
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to realize the imperative once he a
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epresentation and defeasible reason
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equative reading can be paraphrased
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‘the greatest French soldier’ t
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2.4. Plurals 2.4.1. Plural definite
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group of people constituting the on
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3. A(n) sole/*only The solution to
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ichest i : richest ii :: only : sol
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In the case of a singular definite
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The lexical entries we have given f
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Strawson, P. F. 1950. On referring.
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In this paper, I show that a dialec
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(3) […] argretter, qu’dins ch
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2.3. Are there any restrictions on
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stand to the right of que2, which,
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heads FinP (Bovetto 2002, López 20
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(24) a. j’prétinds qu’à l’h
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. *T’as raison Colas, faut tacher
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6. Conclusion This paper shows that
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Appendix Frequency of DCC for embed
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In this paper, I provide empirical
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subjects are realized in a cleft to
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problem with the examples in (11),
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continuations chosen after exclusiv
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The questions were of two forms: ei
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quantified lexical subject any elem
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QUD:Qui a corrigé les copies? SF S
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Finally, the ranking proposed, with
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Onea, Edgar, and David Beaver. 2011
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semantics of these constructions ha
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filter. A quantifier like two sailo
Page 124 and 125: are not principal filters, can be c
Page 126 and 127: (22) monotone increasing NPs like a
Page 128 and 129: the equation of the formulas in (27
Page 130 and 131: presuppose the non-emptiness of the
Page 132 and 133: tune with the well-known observatio
Page 134 and 135: Keenan, Edward. 1996. The semantics
Page 136 and 137: (2) Paul veut que nous {soyons SUBJ
Page 138 and 139: (8) Le professeur subodore que les
Page 140 and 141: • verbs describing a course of ac
Page 142 and 143: The semantico-pragmatic condition h
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Page 146 and 147: dire (‘say’) or suggérer (‘s
Page 148 and 149: However, it must be stressed that t
Page 150 and 151: If it is the case that those moves
Page 152 and 153: certain environments. Again, the re
Page 154 and 155: Gross, Maurice. 1978. Correspondanc
Page 156 and 157: Semantically, the difference betwee
Page 158 and 159: (14) a. Descriptive meaning of (13)
Page 160 and 161: What is crucial here is that the en
Page 162 and 163: (30) a. Heute steigt sau die coole
Page 164 and 165: In the following, we will give a te
Page 166 and 167: These contrasts in their syntactic
Page 168 and 169: (50) [ QP je- [ DP der [ NP Student
Page 170 and 171: degree expression out of a seemingl
Page 172 and 173: 969264437.pdf. Koopman, Hilda, and
Page 176 and 177: NP [AGR=[PERS=3,NUM=sing]] John S N
Page 178 and 179: Class CanSubj S Class DirObj VP Cla
Page 180 and 181: a. ⎡ ⎤ causation [ ] activity C
Page 182 and 183: lexical meaning PO pattern DO patte
Page 184 and 185: ⎡ ⎤ a. S causation [ ] NP [I= 1
Page 186 and 187: Class VSpine syntactic dimension VP
Page 188 and 189: sends ⎡ ⎤ causation EFFECTOR 8
Page 190 and 191: Crabbé, Benoit. 2005. Grammatical
Page 192 and 193: Claim 2. Semantic composition of ve
Page 194 and 195: (7) yo-k2nol-ú 3Z/N.SG.PAT-rain-ST
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Page 200 and 201: (26) a. ⎡ ⎤ English-transitive-
Page 202 and 203: Abstracting away from the particula
Page 204 and 205: As shown by the statement of the no
Page 206 and 207: (36) Áhs2 ni-ka-nláht-a-ke 2-té-
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Page 210 and 211: aises, of course, the question of w
Page 213 and 214: A finer look at predicate decomposi
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Page 217 and 218: Do these relations correspond to di
Page 219 and 220: paper. The wider claim is that sube
Page 221 and 222: More significantly, all involve dir
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other heads. Secondly, spell-out pa
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Finally, (53) shows the inchoative
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⏟ AA ⏟ (61) [ v P … v TR [ Ak
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Negation-resistant polarity items A
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To summarize, these indefinites can
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covert alternative-sensitive operat
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(17) a. any book = ∃x∈D. x is a
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tion, negative quantifiers and with
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Since PPIs are endowed with the [+D
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4.5. Extra-clausal negation A cruci
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What this data shows us is that PPI
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Prima facie it appears to be the ca
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