Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 110-142).

Thesis--Frankfurt am Main. / Vita. Includes index. Bibliography: p. 283-306.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas, Austin, 1983. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 145-147).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1967. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1986. / Vita. Bibliography: leaves [406]-427.

Implementations of grammatical theory have traditionally been based upon Context- Free Grammar (CFG) formalisms which all but ignore questions of learnability. Even implementations which are based upon theories of Generative Grammar (GG), a paradigm which is supposedly motivated by learnability, rarely address such questions. In this thesis we will examine a GG theory which has been formulated primarily to address questions of learnability and present an implementation based upon this theory. The theory argues from Chomsky's definition of epistemological priority that principles which match elements and structures from prelinguistic systems with elements and structures in linguistic systems are preferable to those which are defined purely linguistically or non-linguistically. A procedure for constructing phrase-structure representations from prelinguistic relations using principles of node percolation (rather than the traditional X-theory of GG theories or phrase-structure rules of CFG theories) is presented and this procedure integrated into a left-right, primarily bottom-up parsing mechanism. Specifically, we present a parsing mechanism which derives phrase-structure representations of sentences from Case- and 0-relations using a small number of Percolation Principles. These Percolation Principles simply determine the categorial features of the dominant node of any two adjacent nodes in a representational tree, doing away with explicit phrase structure rules altogether. The parsing mechanism also instantiates appropriate empty categories using a filler-driven paradigm for leftward argument and non-argument movement. Procedures modelling learnability are not implemented in this work, but the applicability of the presented model to a computational model of language is discussed. / Science, Faculty of / Computer Science, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

The lexicon of modern Chinese is composed mainly of disyllabic compound words; some of the compounds are separable, while others are not. Hindered by problems with the definition of the Chinese word and by the concept of separate grammatical levels on which morphological, syntactic and semantic processes occur, previous linguistic studies have been unable to fully account for the separability of some compounds and for the relationship of compound separability to phrase separability. This dissertation finds that, with morphemes having the same syntactic association with other morphemes that words or phrases have with other words or phrases, categorial rules logically explain the common syntax of Chinese words and phrases. In categorial grammar analysis based on the work of Ajdukiewicz (1935), Montague (1974), Partee (1972; 1975), and Bach (1983; 1984), categories are determined by functions associating the expressions in component sets, and syntactic operations build categories up into larger derived categories according to specified functor-argument relations. In the present analysis of Chinese, to the set of the non-verb general category belong morphemes, words and phrases whose form classes are not verbs and which are generic names. Argument expressions, both compound words and verb phrases which belong to this category, combine with the intransitive/non-verb general functor to form the IV category. Rules operating by concatenation, cliticization and wrapping account for the occurrence of resultative expressions, aspect markers, and expressions of time duration or time frequency between the components of separable compounds. Further, the hierarchy of thematic roles devised by Jackendoff (1972) is applied to account for cases in which the functors in IV combine with more than one argument. In this way, an analysis which combines principles of morphology, syntax and semantics is able to account for the identity of compound and phrase separability and derive grammatical sentences for the language.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1982. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES / Bibliography: leaves 506-514. / by Denis Bouchard. / Ph.D.