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14
The acceptability cline in VP ellipsis
, 2010
"... This paper lays the foundations for a processing model of relative acceptability levels in verb phrase ellipsis (VPE). In the proposed model, mismatching VPE examples are grammatical but less acceptable because they violate heuristic parsing strategies. This analysis is presented in a Minimalist G ..."
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This paper lays the foundations for a processing model of relative acceptability levels in verb phrase ellipsis (VPE). In the proposed model, mismatching VPE examples are grammatical but less acceptable because they violate heuristic parsing strategies. This analysis is presented in a Minimalist Grammar formalism that is compatible with standard parsing techniques. The overall proposal integrates computational assumptions about parsing with a psycholinguistic linking hypothesis. These parts work together with the syntactic analysis to derive novel predictions that are confirmed in a controlled experiment.
Eliding the derivation: A minimalist formalization of ellipsis
- In: Müller, S. (Ed.), Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Chungnam National University Daejeon. CSLI Publications
"... Abstract In this paper I use the formal framework of minimalist grammars to implement a version of the traditional approach to ellipsis as 'deletion under syntactic (derivational) identity', which, in conjunction with canonical analyses of voice phenomena, immediately allows for voice mis ..."
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Abstract In this paper I use the formal framework of minimalist grammars to implement a version of the traditional approach to ellipsis as 'deletion under syntactic (derivational) identity', which, in conjunction with canonical analyses of voice phenomena, immediately allows for voice mismatches in verb phrase ellipsis, but not in sluicing. This approach to ellipsis is naturally implemented in a parser by means of threading a state encoding a set of possible antecedent derivation contexts through the derivation tree. Similarities between ellipsis and pronominal resolution are easily stated in these terms. In the context of this implementation, two approaches to ellipsis in the transformational community are naturally seen as equivalent descriptions at different levels: the LF-copying approach to ellipsis resolution is best seen as a description of the parser, whereas the phonological deletion approach a description of the underlying relation between form and meaning.
Minimalist tree languages are closed under intersection with recognizable tree languages
- In Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics, LACL’11
"... Abstract. Minimalist grammars are a mildly context-sensitive gram-mar framework within which analyses in mainstream chomskyian syntax can be faithfully represented. Here it is shown that both the derivation tree languages and derived tree languages of minimalist grammars are closed under intersectio ..."
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Abstract. Minimalist grammars are a mildly context-sensitive gram-mar framework within which analyses in mainstream chomskyian syntax can be faithfully represented. Here it is shown that both the derivation tree languages and derived tree languages of minimalist grammars are closed under intersection with regular tree languages. This allows us to conclude that taking into account the possibility of ‘semantic crashes’ in the standard approach to interpreting minimalist structures does not alter the strong generative capacity of the formalism. In addition, the ad-dition to minimalist grammars of complexity filters is easily shown using a similar proof method to not change the class of derived tree languages. Minimalist grammars (in the sense of [1]) are a formalization of mainstream chomskyian syntax. In this paper I will show that both derived and derivation tree languages of minimalist grammars are closed under intersection with reg-ular tree languages. The technique used in the proofs of this fact is similar to that of [2], where non-terminals of context-free derivation trees were paired with
Reference-set constraints as linear tree transductions via controlled optimality systems
- In Proceedings of the Conference on Formal Grammar, ESSLLI’10
, 2010
"... Abstract. Reference-set constraints are a special class of constraints used in Minimalist syntax. They extend the notion of well-formedness beyond the level of single trees: When presented with some phrase structure tree, they compute its set of competing output candidates and determine the optimal ..."
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Abstract. Reference-set constraints are a special class of constraints used in Minimalist syntax. They extend the notion of well-formedness beyond the level of single trees: When presented with some phrase structure tree, they compute its set of competing output candidates and determine the optimal output(s) accord-ing to some economy metric. Doubts have frequently been raised in the literature whether such constraints are computationally tractable [6]. I define a subclass of Optimality Systems (OSs) that is sufficiently powerful to accommodate a wide range of reference-set constraints and show that these OSs are globally optimal [7], a prerequisite for them being computable by linear tree transducers. As reg-ular and linear context-free tree languages are closed under linear tree transduc-tions, this marks an important step towards showing that the expressivity of vari-ous syntactic formalisms is not increased by adding reference-set constraints. In the second half of the paper, I demonstrate the feasibility of the OS-approach by exhibiting an efficiently computable OS for a prominent reference-set constraint,
Without remnant movement, MGs are context-free
- MOL 10/11. Lecture Notes in Computer Science
, 2010
"... Abstract. Minimalist grammars offer a formal perspective on a popular linguistic theory, and are comparable in weak generative capacity to other mildly context sensitive formalism. Minimalist grammars allow for the straightforward definition of so-called remnant movement constructions, which have fo ..."
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Abstract. Minimalist grammars offer a formal perspective on a popular linguistic theory, and are comparable in weak generative capacity to other mildly context sensitive formalism. Minimalist grammars allow for the straightforward definition of so-called remnant movement constructions, which have found use in many linguistic analyses. It has been conjectured that the ability to generate this kind of configuration is crucial to the super-context-free expressivity of minimalist grammars. This conjecture is here proven. In the minimalist program of [2], the well-formedness conditions on movement-type dependencies of the previous GB Theory [1] are reimplemented deriva-tionally, so as to render ill-formed movement chains impossible to assemble. For example, the c-command restriction on adjacent chain links is enforced by making movement always to the root of the current subtree–a position c-commanding any other. One advantage of this derivational reformulation of chain well-formedness conditions is that so-called ‘remnant movement ’ configurations, as depicted on the left in figure 1, are easy to generate. Remnant movement oc-curs when, due to previous movement operations, a moving expression does not itself have a grammatical description. Here we imagine that the objects deriv-able by the grammar in figure 1 include the black triangle and the complex of white and black triangles, but not the white triangle to the exclusion of the black triangle. From an incremental bottom-up perspective, the structure on the left in figure 1 first involves moving the grammatically specifiable black trian-gle, but then the non-directly grammatically describable white triangle moves. This is to be contrasted with the superficially similar configuration on the right in figure 1, in which, again from an incremental bottom-up perspective, both
Ellipsis: Computation of
, 2012
"... A computational account of ellipsis should specify not only how the meaning of an elliptical sentence is com-puted in context, but also a description of what is be-ing computed. Many proposals can be divided into two groups, as per whether they compute the mean-ing of an elliptical sentence based on ..."
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A computational account of ellipsis should specify not only how the meaning of an elliptical sentence is com-puted in context, but also a description of what is be-ing computed. Many proposals can be divided into two groups, as per whether they compute the mean-ing of an elliptical sentence based on the semantic or the syntactic parts of its context. A unifying theme of these proposals is that they are all based on the idea that the meaning of an elliptical sentence is deter-minable based on a structured representation which is transformationally related to its surface syntactic structure. 1
Idioms and extended transducers
"... There is a tension between the idea that idioms can be both listed in the lexi-con, and the idea that they are them-selves composed of the lexical items which seem to inhabit them in the stan-dard way. In other words, in order to maintain the insight that idioms actu-ally contain the words they look ..."
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There is a tension between the idea that idioms can be both listed in the lexi-con, and the idea that they are them-selves composed of the lexical items which seem to inhabit them in the stan-dard way. In other words, in order to maintain the insight that idioms actu-ally contain the words they look like they contain, we need to derive them syntactically from these words. How-ever, the entity that should be assigned a special meaning is then a derivation, which is not the kind of object that can occur in a lexicon (which is, by defini-tion, the atoms of which derivations are built), and thus not the kind of thing that we are able to assign meanings di-rectly to. Here I will show how to resolve this tension in an elegant way, one which bears striking similarities to those pro-posed by psychologists and psycholin-guists working on idioms. 1
Syntax and Semantics in Minimalist Grammars
- ESSLLI ’09
, 2009
"... This chapter presents a grammar for a fragment of English A-movement. The constructions accounted for include raising, passivization, and control. Section 1 motivates our basic syntactic theory, culminating in an account of raising and passivization, along with a novel account of expletive it, which ..."
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This chapter presents a grammar for a fragment of English A-movement. The constructions accounted for include raising, passivization, and control. Section 1 motivates our basic syntactic theory, culminating in an account of raising and passivization, along with a novel account of expletive it, which immediately explains the ban on superraising in terms of independently motivated notions of intervention and case assignment. Section 2 presents a directly compositional semantics for our syntactic theory, one which maps derivations incrementally to model-theoretic objects, making no reference to syntactic trees. We extend our fragment with quantifiers, and show how we can derive quantifier scope ambiguities without a seperate operation of quantifier raising (QR). The tense clause boundedness of QR is easily shown to be simply and directly replicable in our system in terms of independently motivated assumptions about feature checking. We extend our fragment once more to account for control, which, given our semantic operations, is naturally implemented in terms of movement to theta positions. This treatment
