Tübingen, University, Diss., 1999.

Universiẗat, Diss., 2001--Tübingen.

In this dissertation, I provide a left-to-right incremental parsing approach for Headdriven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG; Pollard and Sag (1987, 1994)). HPSG is a lexicalized, constraint-based theory of grammar, which has also been widely exploited in computational linguistics in recent years. Head-final languages are known to pose problems for the incrementality of head-driven parsing models, proposed for parsing with constraint-based grammar formalisms, in both psycholinguistics and computational linguistics. Therefore, here I further focusmy attention on processing a head-final language, specifically Turkish, to highlight any challenges that may arise in the case of such a language. The dissertation makes two principal contributions, the first part mainly providing the theoretical treatment required for the computational approach presented in the second part. The first part of the dissertation is concerned with the analysis of certain phenomena in Turkish grammar within the framework of HPSG. The phenomena explored in this part include word order variation and relativization in Turkish. Turkish is a head-final language that exhibits a considerable degree of word order freedom, with both local and long-distance scrambling. I focus on the syntactic aspects of this freedomin simple and complex Turkish sentences, detailing the assumptions Imake both to dealwith the variation in the word order, and also to capture certain restrictions on that variation, within the HPSG framework. The second phenomenon, relativization in Turkish, has drawn considerable attention in the literature, all accounts so far being within the tradition of transformational grammar. Here I propose a purely lexical account of the phenomenon within the framework of HPSG, which I claim is empirically more adequate than previous accounts, as well as being computationally more attractive. The motivation behind the work presented in the second part of the dissertation mainly stems from psycholinguistic considerations. Experimental evidence (e.g. Marslen- Wilson (1973)) has shown that human language processing is highly incremental, meaning that humans construct aword-by-word partial representation of an utterance as they hear each word. Here I explore the computational effectiveness of an incremental processing mechanism for HPSG grammars. I argue that any such processing mechanism has to employ some sort of nonmonotonicity in order to guarantee both completeness and termination, and propose a way of doing that without violating the soundness of the overall approach. I present a parsing approach for HPSG grammars that parses a string of words fromleft to right, attaching every word of the input to a global structure as soon as it is encountered, thereby dynamically changing the structure as the parse progresses. I further focus on certain issues that arise in incremental processing of a “free”word order, head-final language like Turkish. First, I investigate howthe parser can benefit from the case values in Turkish in foreseeing the existence of an embedded phrase/clause before encountering its head, thereby improving the incrementality of structuring. Second, I propose a strategy for the incremental recovery of filler-gap relations in certain kinds of unbounded dependency constructions in Turkish, which further enables one to capture a number of (strong) preferences that humans exhibit in processing certain examples with potentially ambiguous long-distance dependency relations.

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Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-11T13:49:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 vanessa.pdf: 2538261 bytes, checksum: 22a79ec6ec4a9c95e3c0d9514975ea7d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-08-29 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This study presents an analysis both syntactic and semantic of the verb poder in Brazilian Portuguese. To achieve this goal, we started with a literature review, which consisted of works dedicated to the study of auxiliarity and modality in order to determine what these issues imply and what is usually considered for classifying the verb under investigation as an auxiliary and/or modal verb. As foundations of this study, we used two theories, namely, HPSG (Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar Gramática de Estruturas Sintagmáticas Orientadas pelo Núcleo), a model of surface oriented generative grammar, which consists of a phonological, a syntactic and a semantic component, and GL (The Generative Lexicon O Léxico Gerativo), a lexicalist model of semantic interpretation of natural language, which is proposed to deal with problems such as compositionality, semantic creativity, and logical polysemy. Because these models are unable to handle the verb poder of the Brazilian Portuguese as they were originally proposed, it was necessary to use the GL to make some modifications in HPSG, in order to semantically enrich this model of grammar, so that it can cope with the logical polysemy of the verb poder, its behavior as a raising and a control verb, the saturation of its internal argument, as well as to identify when it is an auxiliary verb. The analysis showed that: (a) poder has four meanings inherent to it, namely, CAPACITY, ABILITY, POSSIBILITY and PERMISSION; (b) to saturate the internal argument of poder, the phrase candidate to saturate that argument must be of type [proposition] and the core of that phrase must be of type [event]. In case those types are not identical, the type coercion is applied in order to recover the requested type for that verb; (c) poder is a raising verb when it means POSSIBILITY, in such case it selects no external argument. That is, it accepts as its subject whatever the subject of its VP-complement is; (d) poder is a control verb when it means CAPACITY, ABILITY and/or PERMISSION and in this case it requires that the saturator of its internal argument be of type [entity] when poder means CAPACITY, or of type [animal] when it means ABILITY and/or PERMISSION; (e) poder is an auxiliary verb only when it is a raising verb, because only in this situation it does not impose any selectional restrictions on the external argument and (f ) poder is considered a modal verb because it can express an epistemic notion possibility and at least three non-epistemic notions of modality capacity, ability and permission. / Este trabalho apresenta uma análise tanto sintática quanto semântica do verbo poder do português brasileiro. Para alcançar esse objetivo, partiu-se de uma revisão de literatura, a qual compreendeu trabalhos dedicados ao estudo da auxiliaridade e da modalidade, a fim de verificar o que essas questões implicam e o que geralmente é levado em consideração para classificar o verbo investigado como auxiliar e/ou modal. Como alicerces deste trabalho, foram utilizadas duas teorias, quais sejam, a HPSG (Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar Gramática de Estruturas Sintagmáticas Orientadas pelo Núcleo), um modelo de gramática gerativa orientada pela superfície, a qual é constituída de um componente fonológico, um sintático e um semântico, e o GL (The Generative Lexicon O Léxico Gerativo), um modelo lexicalista de interpretação semântica de língua natural, que se propõe a lidar com problemas como a composicionalidade, a criatividade semântica e a polissemia lógica. Devido ao fato de esses modelos não conseguirem lidar com o verbo poder do português brasileiro como eles foram propostos originalmente, foi necessário utilizar o GL para fazer algumas modificações na HPSG, a fim de enriquecer semanticamente esse modelo de gramática, de modo que ele consiga dar conta da polissemia lógica do verbo poder, de seu comportamento como verbo de alçamento e de controle, da saturação de seu argumento interno, além de identificar quando ele é um verbo auxiliar. A análise mostrou que: (a) quatro são os significados inerentes ao verbo poder, quais sejam, CAPACIDADE, HABILIDADE, PERMISSÃO e POSSIBILIDADE; (b) para saturar o argumento interno do verbo poder, o sintagma candidato a saturador deve ser do tipo [proposição], e o núcleo desse sintagma deve ser do tipo [evento] e, não havendo essa identidade de tipos, recorre-se à aplicação da construção de coerção de tipo para recuperar o tipo solicitado por aquele verbo; (c) poder é verbo de alçamento quando significa POSSIBILIDADE e, nesse caso, não seleciona argumento externo. Ou seja, aceita como sujeito qualquer que seja o sujeito de seu VP-complemento; (d) poder é verbo de controle quando significa CAPACIDADE, HABILIDADE e/ou PERMISSÃO e, nesse caso, requer que o sintagma saturador de seu argumento interno seja ou do tipo [entidade], quando significa CAPACIDADE, ou do tipo [animal], quando significa HABILIDADE e/ou PERMISSÃO; (e) poder só é verbo auxiliar quando é um verbo de alçamento, pois só nessa situação não impõe restrições selecionais quanto ao argumento externo; e (f) poder é considerado um verbo modal porque pode expressar uma noção epistêmica possibilidade e pelo menos três noções não epistêmicas de modalidade capacidade, habilidade e permissão.

Most western Iranian languages, despite their broad differences, show a common quality when it comes to the verbal agreement of past transitive verbs. Dabir-moghaddam (2013) and Haig (2008) discuss it as a grammaticalized split-agreement to encode S, A, and P, which is sensitive to tense and transitivity, and uses split-ergative constructions for its past transitive verbs. Laki shows vestiges of the same kind of verb-agreement ergativity (Comrie 1978) by using a mixture of affixes and clitics for subject and object marking. In this thesis, I investigate how the different classes of verbs show agreement using four distinct property classes. Considering the special case of the {3 sg} and using Hopper and Traugott's pattern for the cline of grammaticality (2003), I argue that although Laki has already lost the main part of its ergative constructions, the case of the {3 sg} marking is yet another sign that this language is in the process of absolute de-ergativization and its hybrid alignment system is moving toward morphosyntactic unity. As a formal representation of the Laki data, the final part of the thesis provides a morphosyntactic HPSG analysis of the agreement patterns in Laki, using the grammar of cliticized verb-forms (Miller and Sag 1997).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xiii, 173 p.; also includes graphics. Includes bibliographical references (p. 160-171). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

In the literature on prepositions, a simple binary distinction between ``lexical\'\' and ``functional\'\' uses is commonly assumed. In this thesis I investigate the nature of the lexical vs. functional distinction for prepositions, and I argue that these two uses correspond to cardinal points of a spectrum of prepositional uses. This spectrum can be modelled descriptively as the interaction of two properties: form-fixedness and perceived meaningfulness. At the functional corner of the spectrum, prepositions are characterized by low meaningfulness and high fixedness, while at the lexical corner, prepositions have high meaningfulness and low fixedness. There are also, however, prepositions that are perceived to be both meaningful and fixed, and these present a problem for the notion of a simple binary lexical vs. functional dichotomy. <br />A number of empirical tests have been proposed for inducing a binary classification of prepositional uses---for example, formation of the pseudopassive and wh-questions, and specifier attachment. While these are all interesting phenomena individually, they do not converge on a single classification collectively, and I conclude that there are no broad generalizations to be captured by postulating a primitive lexical vs. functional distinction theoretically.<br />My own analysis, formalized in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, includes two binary distinctions between contentful vs. empty prepositions, and between prepositions with syntactically selected form vs. those without. The interaction of these distinctions results in an idealized representation of the three-cornered descriptive spectrum of meaningfulness and fixedness. I discuss various ways in which my more or less discrete formal representations can give rise to gradient behavior on a descriptive level.

Cette thèse se centre sur les discordances dans l’ellipse périphérique (RNR) et propose une analyse basée sur l’identité de lexème entre le matériel manquant et le matériel périphérique. Les analyses précédentes accordent de l’importance au syncrétisme, ou identité phonologique (Pullum & Zwicky (1986)). Dans cette thèse, nous contestons cette hypothèse. Nous avons analysé 5 types de discordance dans l’ellipse périphérique: discordances de polarité, de possessifs, de prépositions, de voix et de formes verbales. Nos études de corpus sur Internet, sur Frtenten 2012 (1.6 milliard de mots) (Baroni et al. (2009)) et sur le English Web 2013 (19 milliard mots) montrent l’existence des discordances dans l’ellipse périphérique en français et en anglais. Les discordances sont assez nombreuses même dans des écrits soignés. Dans tous les cas, les discordances sont résolues par la forme qui correspond au second conjoint. Les résultats des expériences de jugements d’acceptabilité et de mouvements oculaires permettent d’intégrer les discordances dans la grammaire. Les résultats sont compatibles avec les analyses qui postulent l’identité sémantique entre le matériel manquant et l’antécédent pour l’ellipse. Nous proposons une analyse formelle en HPSG.Nous comparons les résultats obtenus avec les cas de coordination lexicale. Nous montrons que l’accord de proximité s’applique (Villavicencio et al. (2005)) et nous proposons une analyse HPSG pour la coordination de verbes et de prépositions. / This thesis focuses on mismatches in peripheral ellipsis (RNR) and proposes an analysis based on lexeme identity between the missing material and the peripheral material. Previous analyses put emphasis on syncretism, or phonological identity (Pullum & Zwicky (1986)). In this thesis, we challenge this hypothesis. We analyzed 5 types of mismatches in peripheral ellipsis: polarity mismatch, possessive mismatch, voice mismatch and verbal form mismatch. Our corpus studies on the Internet, on Frtenten 2012 (1.6 billion words) (Baroni et al. (2009)) and on English Web 2013 (19 billion words) shows the existence of mismatches in peripheral ellipsis in French and English. Mismatches are quite numerous even in careful writings. In all cases, the mismatches are resolved by the form that corresponds to the second conjunct. The results of acceptability judgment tests and eye tracking experiments allow the integration of these mismatches into the grammar. The results are compatible with analyses postulating semantic identity between the missing material and the antecedent for ellipsis. We formalize peripheral ellipsis with mismatch within HPSG.We finally compare our results with lexical coordination. We show that it obeys closest conjunct agreement (Villavicencio et al (2005)) and propose a HPSG analysis for coordination of verbs and prepositions.

<p>In this thesis I have investigated verb frame divergences in a bilingual Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar for machine translation. The purpose was threefold: (1) to describe and classify verb frame divergences (VFDs) between Swedish and English, (2) to practically implement a bilingual grammar that covered many of the identified VFDs and (3) to find out what cases of VFDs could be solved and implemented using a common semantic representation, or interlingua, for Swedish and English.</p><p>The implemented grammar, BiTSE, is a Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar based on the LinGO Grammar Matrix, a language independent grammar base. BiTSE is a bilingual grammar containing both Swedish and English. The semantic representation used is Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS). It is language independent, so generating from it gives all equivalent sentences in both Swedish and English. Both the core of the languages and a subset of the identified VFDs are successfully implemented in BiTSE. For other VFDs tentative solutions are discussed.</p><p>MRS have previously been proposed as suitable for semantic transfer machine translation. I have shown that VFDs can naturally be handled by an interlingual design in many cases, minimizing the need of transfer.</p><p>The main contributions of this thesis are: an inventory of English and Swedish verb frames and verb frame divergences; the bilingual grammar BiTSE and showing that it is possible in many cases to use MRS as an interlingua in machine translation.</p>