Phrase structure analyses of partial verb phrase (hence: PVP) fronting in German recognize PVPs as potential constituents---i.e, they are constituents not only in the Vorfeld, which they can and must be, but existing analyses inevitably have the consequence that PVPs are potential constituents in the Mittelfeld as well. Given the range of frontable PVPs this has the undesirable consequence that a great deal of otherwise unmotivated phrase structure is postulated in the Mittelfeld, which, moreover, must be assumed to provide alternative constituent structures---the structures overlap in ways incompatible with simple tree structures. Haider has noted this problem, which results in the postulation of spurious ambiguity---structural ambiguity which appears to have neither semantic correlate nor syntactic motivation. This is a problem which Pollard's "On Head Non-Movement" ends with, and the contribution here is a simple suggestion on how to avoid these unwanted ambiguities. The suggestion ...

this paper, we will study the possibilities for applying lexical rules to the analysis of English syntax, and in particular the structure of the verb phrase. We will develop a lexicon whose empirical coverage extends to the full range of verb subcategories, complex adverbial phrases, auxiliaries, the passive construction, yes/no questions and the particularly troublesome case of predicatives. The effect of a lexical rule, in our system, will be to produce new lexical entries from old lexical entries. The similarity between our system and the metarule system of generalized phrase-structure grammar (GPSG, as presented in Gazdar, et al. 1985) is not coincidental. Our lexical rules serve much the same purpose as metarules in GPSG, which were restricted to lexical phrase structure rules. The similarity is in a large part due to the fact that with the universal phrase-structure schemes being fixed, the role of a lexical category assignment in effect determines phrase-structure in much the same way as a lexical category entry and lexical phrase-structure rule determines lexical phrase-structure in GPSG. Our lexical rules will also bear a relationship to the lexical rules found in lexical-functional grammar (LFG, see Bresnan 1982), as LFG rules are driven by the grammatical role assigned to arguments. Many of our analyses were first applied to either LFG or GPSG, as these were the first serious linguistic theories based on a notion of unification. In the process of explaining the basic principles behind categorial grammar and developing our lexical rule system, we will establish a categorial grammar lexicon with coverage of English syntactic constructions comparable to that achieved within published accounts of the GPSG or LFG frameworks. Language, at its most abstract level, i...

This chapter considers the revolution that has taken place in natural language processing research over the last five years. It begins by providing a brief guide to the structure of the field and then presents a caricature of two competing paradigms of 1980s NLP research and indicates the reasons why many of those involved have now seen fit to abandon them in their pure forms. Attention is then directed to the lexicon, a component of NLP systems which started out as Cinderella but which has finally arrived at the ball. This brings us to an account of what has been going on in the field most recently, namely a merging of the two 1980s paradigms in a way that is generating a host of interesting new research questions. The chapter concludes by trying to identify some of the key conceptual, empirical and formal issues that now stand in need of resolution. 1.1 Introduction The academic discipline that studies computer processing of natural languages is known as natural language processing ...

Introduction This chapter discusses the syntactic and semantic relations between the `head of a phrase' and the phrase itself. 1 In particular, the phrase is a `kind of' the head since the latter provides both the semantic and syntactic type of the phrase (Hudson, 1987: 115--6). For example, the noun can be treated as head in noun phrases and its systematic priority over other categories in the phrase, such as adjectives and determiners, is manifest in the syntactic and semantic type of the phrase. 2 There are three reasons for discussing these syntactic and semantic relations. The first is to introduce a unification framework which characterizes them in terms of a dependency approach to combination: categories in a binary phrase are combined as `head' and `modifier' (or `dependent') (Hays, 1964; Anderson, 1977: 92--100; Hudson, 1984: 75--9; Miller, 1985: 25--31). The second reason is to show that this framework provides a better account of these r

The varieties of mathematical basis for formalizing linguistic theories are more diverse than is commonly realized. For example, the later work of Zellig Harris might well suggest a formalization in terms of CATE-

Half a century ago, Noam Chomsky introduced the field of linguistics to new mathematical tools drawn largely from recursive function theory. These tools imparted a mathematical precision to the enterprise of grammar construction, perhaps for the first time in the history of Linguistics. The cornerstone of Chomsky’s new theoretical edifice, was the grammatical transformation, an analytic device drawn from Emil Post’s conception of proofs and computation as string rewriting. Transformations led to many new insights about a vast array of empirical phenomena left unanalyzed by previous linguistic traditions. As the theory of transformations developed, so did Chomsky’s conception of linguistic theory. Transformational grammar was accorded the status of a theory of idealized linguistic knowledge – linguistic competence, to be distinguished from the more general study of language use (including the unconscious mental processes involved in producing and comprehending utterances), termed linguistic performance. The relation between these two notions, as Chomsky (1965:10) emphasized, is that “... investigation of performance will proceed only so far as understanding of underlying competence permits.” For all their initial descriptive success, however, linguistic transformations have proven

It has also been proposed that head movement cannot proceed from a lexical category (N, V, A, P) through a functional category (T, C, D(et)) back to a lexical category to explain why functional (grammatical) morphemes are not found in, say, causative structures (*make-fut-work; see Li 1990). A typology of head movement has also been proposed (Koopman 1983) that includes one type of head movement with the characteristics of NP-Movement (like passive and raising), and another with the characteristics of WH-MOVEMENT. Head movement is different from maximal projection movement in that it can be seen to create both morphologically complex, as well as the meaning of morphologically simple words, arguably putting it into direct competition with lexical and semantic rules, yet because it shows parallel restrictions and typology to rules that permute maximal projections, it can be said to be part of the computational component of SYNTAX.

Many processes contribute to the speech production system. Brain damage can lead to a wide variety of disorders of the spontaneous production of sentences. Different symptoms of a sentence construction disorder, such as agrammatic and paragrammatic speech errors, are briefly described. An explicit model of the grammatical processes is proposed, and it is shown how the symptoms can be explained in terms of selective impairments to components of the model. The construction of subject-verb agreement in speech is treated in detail. 1.

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 focus my 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 frame...