This dissertation proposes a principle of "economy of command", arguing that it provides a simple and natural explanation for some well-known properties of human language syntax. The focus is on the abstract combinatorial system that constructs the hierarchical structure of linguistic expressions, with long-distance dependencies determined by the structural relation of c-command. Adopting the assumption of much recent work that properties of syntax reflect very general organizational principles, I propose that syntactic forms with fewer and shorter c-command relations are preferred. Within the boundaries of strict binary branching assumed here, this results in a preference for hierarchical tree structures to be shallow and bushy, rather than deep and narrow. I pursue two broad applications of this principle, to syntactic movement and phrase structure. I argue that movement, the displacement of material to thematically unrelated positions, is a mechanism to reduce the number and length of c-command relations in the affected structures. I detail the properties we expect if movement is driven by this principle, including antilocality, a size threshold effect, a class of island effects, and feedback effects on iterated patterns of movement. I argue that these predictions align well with recent empirical descriptions of syntactic movement. I develop an account in these terms of the cross-linguistic ordering of elements within nominal phrases. Utilizing a computer program, I show that a single underlying structure common to all languages can give rise to all and only the attested word order possibilities via c-command-reducing movements, and describe the required shape of this underlying structure. The principle of economy of command also makes predictions about the format of phrase structure. Among the possible ways to build self-similar syntactic structure, the phrasal forms that build trees with the fewest c-command relations are "endocentric", in the geometric sense that each phrase contains a unique local terminal, and every daughter of the phrase that does not contain its associated terminal is another phrase. This provides a structural basis for the mysterious headedness of phrases. These successes support the validity of the principle, and reinforce the broader project of seeking naturalistic explanation of linguistic properties.

Chan Kun-Chung Timothy. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 79-83). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Motivation --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Outline of Thesis --- p.3 / Chapter 2 --- Background --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1 --- Chinese Noun Phrase Structure --- p.5 / Chapter 2.2 --- Literature Review --- p.6 / Chapter 2.3 --- Observations --- p.10 / Chapter 2.4 --- Chapter Summary --- p.11 / Chapter 3 --- Maximal Chinese Noun Phrase Extraction System --- p.13 / Chapter 3.1 --- Background --- p.13 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- Part-of-speech Tagset --- p.13 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- The Tagging System --- p.14 / Chapter 3.1.3 --- Chinese Corpus --- p.16 / Chapter 3.1.4 --- Grammar Rules and Boundary Information --- p.17 / Chapter 3.1.5 --- Feature Selection --- p.19 / Chapter 3.2 --- Overview of Our Chinese Noun Phrase Extraction System --- p.19 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Training --- p.19 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Testing --- p.21 / Chapter 3.3 --- Chapter Summary --- p.21 / Chapter 4 --- Preliminary Noun Phrase Extraction --- p.23 / Chapter 4.1 --- Framework --- p.23 / Chapter 4.2 --- Boundary Information Acquisition --- p.24 / Chapter 4.3 --- Candidate Boundary Insertion --- p.26 / Chapter 4.4 --- Pairing of Candidate Boundaries --- p.27 / Chapter 4.4.1 --- Conditional Probability-based Model --- p.28 / Chapter 4.4.2 --- Heuristic-based Model --- p.29 / Chapter 4.4.3 --- Dynamic Programming-based Model --- p.30 / Chapter 4.4.4 --- Model Selection --- p.31 / Chapter 4.4.5 --- Revised Dynamic Programming Model --- p.32 / Chapter 4.4.6 --- Analysis of the Impact of the Revised DP Model --- p.35 / Chapter 4.4.7 --- Experiments of Dynamic Programming-based Model --- p.38 / Chapter 4.4.8 --- Result Analysis --- p.42 / Chapter 4.5 --- Concluding Remarks on DP-Based Model --- p.47 / Chapter 4.6 --- Chapter Summary --- p.49 / Chapter 5 --- Automatic Error Correction --- p.50 / Chapter 5.1 --- Introduction --- p.50 / Chapter 5.1.1 --- Statistical Properties of TEL --- p.54 / Chapter 5.1.2 --- Related Applications --- p.55 / Chapter 5.2 --- Settings of Main Components --- p.57 / Chapter 5.2.1 --- Initial State --- p.58 / Chapter 5.2.2 --- Transformation Actions --- p.58 / Chapter 5.2.3 --- Triggering Features of Transformation Templates --- p.58 / Chapter 5.2.4 --- Evaluation of Rule --- p.62 / Chapter 5.2.5 --- Stopping Threshold --- p.62 / Chapter 5.3 --- Experiments and Results --- p.63 / Chapter 5.3.1 --- Setup and Procedure --- p.63 / Chapter 5.3.2 --- Overall Performance --- p.63 / Chapter 5.3.3 --- Contribution of Rules --- p.67 / Chapter 5.3.4 --- Remarks on Rules Learning --- p.69 / Chapter 5.3.5 --- Discussion on Recall Performance --- p.70 / Chapter 5.4 --- Chapter Summary --- p.73 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusion --- p.74 / Chapter 6.1 --- Summary --- p.74 / Chapter 6.2 --- Contributions --- p.76 / Chapter 6.3 --- Future Work --- p.76 / Bibliography --- p.79 / Chapter A --- Chinese POS Tag Set --- p.84 / Chapter B --- Algorithms of Boundary Pairing Models --- p.88 / Chapter B.1 --- Heuristic based Model --- p.88 / Chapter B.2 --- Dynamic Programming based Model --- p.89 / Chapter C --- Triggering Environments of Transformation Templates --- p.91

by Li Wenjie. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 209-226). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

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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.

Much recent attention has been devoted to the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic properties of phrasal verbs--those two-part lexical items like "put on" and "tighten up", along with suggestions regarding effective methods of teaching them to non-native speakers. According to Cornell (1985), phrasal verbs, "have been 'discovered' as an important component in curricula for English as a Foreign Language" (p. 1). However, it is very possible that they have become objects of current research primarily because of their complexity: their polysemy, their idiomaticity, their syntactic restraints, a complexity that means covering phrasal verbs in an ESL/EFL course can be a time-consuming process.

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No description available.

A cross-sectional study of the performance of groups of Vietnamese learners is reported with focus on how they deal with the expression of number in English (singular/plural; definite/indefinite) through a cloze exercise and a translation excercise. This research investigates the hypothesis that some NP environments facilitate the distinction between singular and plural, count and mass, and that the context in which a noun is used can provide positive clues to the choice of number in nouns. It has been found that transfer of Vietnamese NP structures into English occurred where the NP environment was not obviously countable or uncountable, i.e., it has no conspicuous structural signals for number determination. Transfer was also found where an NP was taken from its context. The analysis of learners' errors gives some insight into ways in which the teaching of the number expression can be made more effective and beneficial for Vietnamese learners. A number of activities were suggested, which enable the teacher to exploit the advantages of NP environments to convey the syntactic-semantic properties of number to learners. Communicative practice of NP structures (e.g., in a conversation or a role play activity) can make learners aware of different aspects of the number expression in English. It is argued that the pragmatic aspect of the number expression is most important as in use, the syntactic and semantic properties of the category of number are unified to achieve communicative purposes.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-88).