This paper sketches a grammar of English relative clause constructions (including infinitival and reduced relatives) based on the notions of construction type and type constraints. Generalizations about dependency relations and clausal functions are factored into distinct dimensions contributing constraints to specific construction types in a multiple inheritance type hierarchy. The grammar presented here provides an account of extraction, pied piping and relative clause `stacking' without appeal to transformational operations, transderivational competition, or invisible (`empty') categories of any kind.

In order to realize their full potential, multimodal systems need to support not just input from multiple modes, but also synchronized integration of modes. Johnston et al (1997) model this integration using a unification operation over typed feature structures. This is an effective solution for a broad class of systems, but limits multimodal utterances to combinations of a single spoken phrase with a single gesture. We show how the unification-based approach can be scaled up to provide a full multimodal grammar formalism. In conjunction with a multidimensional chart parser, this approach supports integration of multiple elements distributed across the spatial, temporal, and acoustic dimensions of multimodal interaction. Integration strategies are stated in a high level unification-based rule formalism supporting rapid prototyping and iterative development of multimodal systems. 1 Introduction Multimodal interfaces enable more natural and efficient interaction between humans and mach...

this paper. Towards that end, comments are welcome. 1 (1) S

Abstract. In this paper, we present a unified feature-based theory of complement, adjunct, and subject extraction, in which there is no need either for valence reducing lexical rules or for phonologically null traces. Our analysis rests on the assumption that the mapping between argument structure and valence is defined by realization constraints which are satisfied by all lexical heads. Arguments can be realized as local dependents, in which case they are selected via the head’s valence features. Alternatively, arguments may be realized in a long-distance dependency construction, in which case they are selected via the head’s SLASH features. Furthermore, we argue that in English post-verbal adjuncts, as well as complements, are syntactic dependents selected by the verb, thus providing a uniform analysis of complement and adjunct extraction. Finally, we provide an alternative treatment of subject extraction which is subsumed by our general analysis and offer a new account of the that-trace effect. 1.

The canonical linguistic process is the cycle of the speech-circuit [Saussure, 1915]. A speaker expresses a psychological idea by means of a physiological articulation. The signal is transmitted through the medium by a physical process incident on a hearer who from the consequent physiological impression recovers the psychological idea. The hearer may then reply, swapping the roles of speaker and hearer, and so the circuit cycles. For communication to be successful speakers and hearers must have shared associations between forms (signifiers) andmeanings(signifieds). De Saussure called such a pairing of signifier and signified a sign. Therelationisone-to-many (ambiguity) and many-to-one (paraphrase). Let us call a stable totality of such associations a language. It would be arbitrary to propose that there is a longest expression (where would we propose to cut off IknowthatyouknowthatIknow that you know...?) therefore language is an infinite abstraction over the finite number of acts of communication that can ever occur. The program of formal syntax [Chomsky, 1957] is to define the set of all and only

This paper surveys terminological representation languages and feature-based unification grammars pointing out the similarities and differences between these two families of attributive description formalisms. Emphasis is given to the logical foundations of these formalisms.

Centering was formulated as a model of the relationship between attentional state, the form of referring expressions, and the coherence of an utterance within a discourse segment (Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein, 1986; Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein, 1995). In this chapter, I argue that the restriction of centering to operating within a discourse segment should be abandoned in order to integrate centering with a model of global discourse structure. The within-segment restriction causes three problems. The first problem is that centers are often continued over discourse segment boundaries with pronominal referring expressions whose form is identical to those that occur within a discourse segment. The second problem is that recent work has shown that listeners perceive segment boundaries at various levels of granularity. If centering models a universal processing phenomenon, it is implausible that each listener is using a different centering algorithm.The third issue is that even for utterances within a discourse segment, there are strong contrasts between utterances whose adjacent utterance within a segment is hierarchically recent and those whose adjacent utterance within a segment is linearly recent. This chapter argues that these problems can be eliminated by replacing Grosz and Sidner's stack model of attentional state with an alternate model, the cache model. I show how the cache model is easily integrated with the centering algorithm, and provide several types of data from naturally occurring discourses that support the proposed integrated model. Future work should provide additional support for these claims with an examination of a larger corpus of naturally occurring discourses.

This paper is based on, but in many parts different from, Kathol and Kasper 1993, and hence supersedes the latter. Thanks to all the people who over the years made comments/suggestions on that earlier paper, in particular Tomaz Erjavec, Tibor Kiss, Robert Levine, Paola Monachesi, Rosanne Pelletier, Susanne Riehemann, Ivan Sag, as well as audiences at Stanford (1992) and Ohio State University (1993), and in particular Robert Kasper and Carl Pollard. Needless to say that this paper would contain fewer mistakes if I had incorporated all their comments. parts that are not predictable on semantic or pragmatic grounds, Dowty and Jacobson (Dowty & Jacobson 1988, henceforth "D&J") attempt to show how agreement too can be viewed as a semantic phenomenon. Whereas this is uncontroversial for instance in the case of agreement that involves "natural gender" for people or regular ways of referring to "plural" vs. "singular" objects, one apparent obstacle to the uniformly semantic view are languages that have "syntactic gender" distinctions, that is classification of all nouns, whether animate or not, into gender classes that do not obviously line up along semantic criteria. An example of such a language is French. In light of such cases, Dowty and Jacobson propose an alternative view of the relation between gender specifications and the things that are referred to in a particular language using expressions bearing those specifications. Instead of indicating that the object referred to directly has the property that is associated with a specific feature (say, being male in the case of masculine gender specification), gender can be regarded as the reflection of the semantic fact holding of an object "in the real world", namely that it is referenced in a particular language by use of ...

istic methods for syntax, just as for a long time McCarthy and Hayes (1969) discouraged exploration of probabilistic methods in Artificial Intelligence. Among his arguments were that: (i) Probabilistic models wrongly mix in world knowledge (New York occurs more in text than Dayton, Ohio, but for no linguistic reason), (ii) Probabilistic models don't model grammaticality (neither Colorless green ideas sleep furiously nor Furiously sleep ideas green colorless have previously been uttered -- and hence must be estimated to have probability zero, Chomsky wrongly assumes -- but the former is grammatical while the latter is not, and (iii) Use of probabilities does not meet the goal of describing the mind-internal I-language as opposed to the observed-in-the-world E-language. This chapter is not meant to be a detailed critique of Chomsky's arguments -- Abney (1996) provides a survey and a rebuttal, and Pereira (2000) has further useful discussion -- but some of these concerns are still importa

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