scholarly journals A left-branching grammar design for incremental parsing

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petter Haugereid ◽  
Mathieu Morey
Keyword(s):  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Constituent Structure ◽  
Incremental Processing ◽  
Extraction Site ◽  
Structure Tree

This paper presents a left-branching constructionalist grammar design where the phrase structure tree does not correspond to the conventional constituent structure. The constituent structure is rather reflected by embeddings on a feature STACK. The design is compatible with incremental processing, as words are combined from left to right, one by one, and it gives a simple account of long distance dependencies, where the extracted element is assumed to be dominated by the extraction site. It is motivated by psycholinguistic findings.

Raising, inversion and agreement in modern Hebrew

2015 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-179
Author(s):  
NURIT MELNIK
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
The Other ◽  
Phrase Structure Grammar ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Embedded Clause ◽  
Long Distance Agreement ◽  
Subject Raising

This paper focuses on the interaction between raising, subject–verb inversion and agreement in Modern Hebrew. It identifies, alongside ‘standard’ (i.e., English-like) subject-to-subject raising, two additional patterns where the embedded subject appears post-verbally. In one, the raising predicate exhibits long-distance agreement with the embedded subject, while in the other, a colloquial variant, it is marked with impersonal (3sm) agreement. The choice between the three raising constructions in the language is shown to be solely dependent on properties of the embedded clause. The data are discussed and analyzed against a background of typological and theoretical work on raising. The analysis, cast in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), builds on research on raising, selectional locality, agreement, subjecthood and information structure, as well as verb-initial constructions in Modern Hebrew.

scholarly journals Phrasal phonology in Copperbelt Bemba

Phonology ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy C. Kula ◽  
Lee S. Bickmore
Keyword(s):  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Single Word ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Rule Based ◽  
Prosodic Phrase ◽  
Tone Spreading ◽  
Phonological Phrase

Copperbelt Bemba exhibits several rightward spreading tonal processes which are sensitive to prosodic phrase structure. The rightmost H tone in a word will undergo unbounded spreading if the word is final in a phonological phrase (φ). In an intonational phrase consisting of several single-word φ's, the rightmost H in the first word will spread through all following toneless φ's. From a rule-based perspective, this can only be accounted for by positing mutually feeding iterative rules, as a single H-tone spreading rule cannot account for the long-distance spreading. Rather, a second rule that spreads a H from the final mora of one word onto the initial mora of the following word is required, as a bridge to further unbounded spreading. Three phrase-sensitive OT constraints are proposed to account for H-tone spreading between words. One is of the domain-juncture variety, requiring the specification of two separate prosodic domains.

scholarly journals Towards an Etiology of Adjunct Islands

Nordlyd ◽  
10.7557/12.25 ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Phase I ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Pitch Accent ◽  
Basic Pattern ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Focus Marking ◽  
Long Distance Movement ◽  
Island Phenomena ◽  
Focus Projection

This paper examines the connection between certain island phenomena for long distance movement, and matching island conditions on focus projection. Based on a description of focus projection that Lisa Selkirk and Michael Rochemont formulate, I take the basic pattern to be that pitch accent on a word may license focus marking on a phrase only if the pitch accented word is not separated from the focus marked phrase by a phrase in Specifier position or in adjunct position. Long distance movement operations are similarly incapable of moving a phrase out of a phrase in Specifier or adjunct position. Using Chomsky's notion of "phase," I argue that this is because Specifiers and adjuncts are phonological phases, and make proposals about what movement and focus projection is that thereby derives this effect. I then propose an interpretation of Chomsky's Bare Phrase Structure that derives the phaseness of these phrases.

Coordination and grammatical relations

1988 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Temporal Order ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Sentence Structure ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
Phrase Structure Grammar ◽  
Transformational Grammar ◽  
Constituent Structure ◽  
Syntactic Features

The most serious recent work on the theory of coordination has probably been done in terms of three theories of grammatical structure: Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG–see especially Gazdar, 1981; Gazdaret al., 1982; 1985; Saget al., 1985; Schachter & Mordechay, 1983), Categorial Grammar (CG–see especially Steedman, 1985; Dowty, 1985) and Transformational Grammar (TG–notably Williams, 1978, 1981; Neijt, 1979; van Oirsouw, 1985, 1987). Each of these approaches is different in important respects: for instance, according to whether or not they allow deletion rules, and according to the kinds of information which they allow to be encoded in syntactic features. However, behind these differences lies an important similarity: in each case the theory concerned makes two assumptions about grammatical structure in general (i.e. about all structures, including coordinate ones):I The basic syntagmatic relations in sentence-structure are part-whole relations (consituent structure) and temporal order; note that this is true whether or not syntactic structure is seen as a ‘projection’ of lexical properties, since these lexical properies are themselves defined in terms of constituent structure and temporal order.

scholarly journals Parsing with Traces: An O(n4) Algorithm and a Structural Representation

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 441-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan K. Kummerfeld ◽  
Dan Klein
Keyword(s):  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Dynamic Program ◽  
Proof Of Concept ◽  
Structural Representation ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Tree Structures ◽  
Graph Structures ◽  
Efficient Learning ◽  
Almost All

General treebank analyses are graph structured, but parsers are typically restricted to tree structures for efficiency and modeling reasons. We propose a new representation and algorithm for a class of graph structures that is flexible enough to cover almost all treebank structures, while still admitting efficient learning and inference. In particular, we consider directed, acyclic, one-endpoint-crossing graph structures, which cover most long-distance dislocation, shared argumentation, and similar tree-violating linguistic phenomena. We describe how to convert phrase structure parses, including traces, to our new representation in a reversible manner. Our dynamic program uniquely decomposes structures, is sound and complete, and covers 97.3% of the Penn English Treebank. We also implement a proof-of-concept parser that recovers a range of null elements and trace types.

Constituent structure

2019 ◽  
pp. 89-116
Author(s):  
Mary Dalrymple ◽  
John J. Lowe ◽  
Louise Mycock
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Structure Determination ◽  
Linear Order ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Structure Representation ◽  
Constituent Structure ◽  
Syntactic Representation ◽  
Grammatical Functions

This chapter examines the organization of overt phrasal syntactic representation, the constituent structure or c-structure. Section 3.1 discusses some traditional arguments for constituent structure representation. Many of these arguments prove to be flawed, since the theory of phrase structure has a different status in LFG than in theories in which grammatical functions are defined configurationally and abstract syntactic (and other) relations are represented in phrase structure terms. Valid criteria within LFG for phrase structure determination are proposed in Section 3.2. The inventory of constituent structure categories, both lexical and functional, that are crosslinguistically available and the theory of the organization of words and categories into phrases are explored in Section 3.3. The general theory of constituent structure organization is exemplified in Section 3.4, where we provide more specific discussion of the constituent structure organization of clauses. Section 3.5 discusses the relation between hierarchical constituent structure and surface linear order.

Lexical Integrity in Morphology

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ignacio Bosque
Keyword(s):  
Argument Structure ◽  
Test Bench ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
Large Set ◽  
Constituent Structure ◽  
Standard Picture ◽  
Lexical Integrity ◽  
Bracketing Paradoxes

The Lexical Integrity Hypothesis (LIH) holds that words are syntactic atoms, implying that syntactic processes and principles do not have access to word segments. Interestingly, when this widespread “negative characterization” is turned into its positive version, a standard picture of the Morphology-Syntax borderline is obtained. The LIH is both a fundamental principle of Morphology and a test bench for morphological theories. As a matter of fact, the LIH is problematic for both lexicalist and anti-lexicalist frameworks, which radically differ in accepting or rejecting Morphology as a component of grammar different from Syntax. Lexicalist theories predict no exceptions to LIH, contrary to fact. From anti-lexicalist theories one might expect a large set of counterexamples to this hypothesis, but the truth is that attested potential exceptions are restricted, as well as confined to very specific grammatical areas. Most of the phenomena taken to be crucial for evaluating the LIH are briefly addressed in this article: argument structure, scope, prefixes, compounds, pronouns, elliptical segments, bracketing paradoxes, and coordinated structures. It is argued that both lexicalist and anti-lexicalist positions crucially depend on the specific interpretations that their proponents are willing to attribute to the very notion of Syntax: a broad one, which basically encompasses constituent structure, binary branching, scope, and compositionality, and a narrow one, which also coverts movement, recursion, deletion, coordination, and other aspects of phrase structure. The objective differences between these conceptions of Syntax are shown to be determinant in the evaluation of LIH’s predictions.

scholarly journals Improved Neural Machine Translation with Source Syntax

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuangzhi Wu ◽  
Ming Zhou ◽  
Dongdong Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Attention Model ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Source Sentence ◽  
Dependency Structures

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) based on the encoder-decoder architecture has recently achieved the state-of-the-art performance. Researchers have proven that extending word level attention to phrase level attention by incorporating source-side phrase structure can enhance the attention model and achieve promising improvement. However, word dependencies that can be crucial to correctly understand a source sentence are not always in a consecutive fashion (i.e. phrase structure), sometimes they can be in long distance. Phrase structures are not the best way to explicitly model long distance dependencies. In this paper we propose a simple but effective method to incorporate source-side long distance dependencies into NMT. Our method based on dependency trees enriches each source state with global dependency structures, which can better capture the inherent syntactic structure of source sentences. Experiments on Chinese-English and English-Japanese translation tasks show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art SMT and NMT baselines.

Long-distance dependencies without filler−gaps: a cognitive-functional alternative in Fluid Construction Grammar

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 242-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
REMI VAN TRIJP
Keyword(s):  
Side Effect ◽  
Construction Grammar ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Extraction Site ◽  
Computational Implementation ◽  
Canonical Position

abstractLong-distance dependencies are notoriously difficult to analyze in a formally explicit way because they involve constituents that seem to have been extracted from their canonical position in an utterance. The most widespread solution is to identify a gap at an extraction site and to communicate information about that gap to its filler, as in What_FILLERdid you see_GAP? This paper rejects the filler−gap solution and proposes a cognitive-functional alternative in which long-distance dependencies spontaneously emerge as a side effect of how grammatical constructions interact with each other for expressing different conceptualizations. The proposal is supported by a computational implementation in Fluid Construction Grammar that works for both parsing and production.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document