Phrase Structure Grammar Research Articles

On the computational completeness of several descriptional complexity restrictions of semi-conditional grammars

A semi-conditional grammar, introduced by Gheorghe Păun, is a form of regulated rewriting system where each rule consists of a context-free core rule A → w along with two strings w + , w − . The rule is applicable if w + (the positive condition) occurs as a substring of the current sentential form, but w − (the negative condition) does not. The maximum lengths i, j of the positive or negative conditional strings, respectively, give a natural measure of descriptional complexity, known as the degree of such grammars. Employing several normal form results on phrase-structure grammars as derived in particular by Viliam Geffert, we improve on previously obtained results by reducing the number of nonterminals of semi-conditional grammars of a given degree ( i , j ) while maintaining computational completeness of the said mechanisms.

Number fission from a formal and functional perspective

Abstract Modal verbs in German show phonologically unconditioned umlaut in the pres.pl versus pres.sg whose functional motivation is unclear. Based on a large sample of dialectological data, I explore the distribution of this umlaut as well as other irregularization strategies like contractions and/or consonant mutations in different paradigm cells. My observations point to the conclusion that these facets of irregularity are morphomic in that they serve no other function than signaling inflectional class coherence. A promising approach to capture these complex patterns of stem allomorphy is Information-based Morphology (IBM), an inferential-realizational approach to morphology developed in the context of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The concept of a stem space allows for expressing implicational or directed generalizations in stem formation and their mapping to phonology. In diachronic terms, however, transcategorial number marking, as proposed in the relevant literature, is a plausible functional motivation for the analogical extension of umlaut as a verbal plural marker.

On the unified representation of continuity and discontinuity and its neurocognitive grounding

Abstract Discontinuity in natural language is characterized by the linear disruption of a continuous string of linguistic expressions forming a constituent. While dependency relations in Dependency Grammar (DG) can capture discontinuity well, phrase-structure-based approaches such as Phrase Structure Grammar (PSG) face difficulty in accommodating discontinuity. Categorial Grammar (CG) has correspondences with PSG, although it can handle discontinuity, if equipped with wrapping operations. Given the existing literature on discontinuity in natural language, it appears that constituency relations of PSG, dependency relations of DG and functor-argument relations of CG are distinct and independent. Here, we argue for a unified representation achieved by taking into account fundamental representational principles of PSG, DG and CG. For simplicity, we show this by considering an embedded clause from Wan, spoken in Ivory Coast, as an illustrative case. The paper then attempts to explain, based on available empirical pieces of evidence, the plausible connections between the unified representation and the neurocognitive representation of continuity and discontinuity in natural language.

Copy raising reconsidered

There is no consensus in the literature regarding the defining characteristics of copy raising (CR), or in other words what determineswhether a CR-like expression is CR or not. As a result, existing analyses target different data sets. In this paper, I propose a different approach to these constructions, which takes a functional perspective. I propose to abandon the term copy raising, which is misleading in a number of ways. Instead, I distinguish between perceptual depiction reports and perceptual inference reports and show that the functions which they fulfill are not particular to CR-like constructions, but are in fact more general. Such an approach, I claim, resolves existing conundrums surrounding CR. The analysis is formalized in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and is inspired by previous accounts of CR in related frameworks such as LFG and SBCG, as well as HPSG analyses. In the spirit of HPSG, the analysis employs type inheritance hierarchies to distinguish between what is shared by the two constructions and what is construction-specific in order to account for alternative realizations of a single lexeme and to ascribe constructional (or extra-lexical) meaning to linguistic elements.

Dutch Anaphoric Possessive Construction

The Dutch anaphoric possessive construction (APC), as exemplified by Tom zijn fiets ‘Tom his bike’, shows a peculiar mix of regularity and idiosyncracy. The article provides a theory-neutral description of its properties and quantitative information about its use in two treebanks, one of spoken Dutch (CGN) and one of written Dutch (Lassy Small). It argues that the APC has a right branching structure and models it in the framework of Constructional Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The latter’s organization of constructions in terms of a finegrained hierarchy of phrase types is shown to provide the means to capture both what the APC has in common with other possessive constructions and what is idiosyncratic of it.

Cognate Object Constructions in Najdi Arabic: An HPSG Approach

Cognate object constructions (COCs) are known for their idiosyncratic properties in that they consist of an intransitive verb that takes an NP whose head is a verbal noun that is semantically and morphologically cognate to the verb. In Arabic literature, this topic is considered one of the understudied linguistic phenomena. Therefore, this paper attempts to contribute to the ongoing linguistic research by exploring COCs in one of the Arabic varieties, namely Najdi Arabic (NA). This paper illustrates the main properties that are shared by all COCs in NA. It also provides a theory-neutral description of the syntactico-semantic properties of one of the COC types, namely the particular event COC. In addition, it offers an analysis of the common core properties of all COCs and the syntactico-semantic properties of particular event COCs using the approach of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG).

The Syntax of Wh-Interrogatives in Hijazi Arabic: A Non-Transformational Approach

Unbounded dependencies are structures where two elements that typically co-occur appear far from one another in spite of the syntactic dependency between them. Wh-interrogatives are one of the mostly investigated types of unbounded dependencies cross-linguistically. To contribute to the ongoing linguistic research in wh-interrogatives, the current paper attempts to explore them in one of the Arabic varieties: Hijazi Arabic (HA). The paper primarily focuses on how to account for the constructions of HA wh-interrogatives using one of the prominent non-transformational theories in generative syntax: Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The analysis proposed herein also sheds light on the word order used in HA. The paper concludes that there are two constraints to which wh-interrogatives in HA are subject.

Second position without movement: Enclitic particles in Passamaquoddy

This paper presents an analysis of the second-position clitics of Maliseet-Passamaquoddy (Algonquian, New Brunswick and Maine) in the framework of Sign-Based Phrase Structure Grammar (Sag 2012). Unlike a previous transformational analysis (Johnson and Rosen 2015) that takes clitics to occupy a functional head in the left periphery, the proposal advanced here makes no use of movement or functional heads. Instead, clitic positions are determined by a small number of maximally simple constructional statements.

Voice mismatch and contrast in French Right-Node Raising

Right-Node Raising is generally considered to impose stricter identity conditions than other kinds of ellipsis, such as VP ellipsis, according to Hankamer & Sag 1976 and Hardt 1993. In this paper, we investigate voice mismatch in French Right-Node Raising (RNR) through a corpus study and two experiments. We show that RNR with voice mismatch can be found in a written corpus (frTenTen 2012) and that many examples involve coordination of a reflexive active and a short passive form. We suggest this is because semantic contrast (here, between self and external agent) plays a role according to Hartmann (2000) and Abeillé and Mouret (2010). We ran two acceptability judgement experiments to test voice mismatch and semantic contrast. We did not find any penalty for voice mismatch with VP ellipsis but an interaction with semantic contrast. We also found an effect of semantic contrast when coordinating an active and a passive VP without participle ellipsis. We conclude that voice mismatch is acceptable with RNR and propose a Head-driven Phrase-Structure Grammar (HPSG) analysis, following Chaves (2014) and Shiraïshi et al. (2019).

Syntactic Analysis of Sentence Structure on Aesop's Fairy Tales

This study aims to analyze the sentence structures of fairy tales. It was designed with a descriptive qualitative research to Aesop’s fairy tales entitled The Lion and The Mouse and The hare and The Tortoise as the data source and by applying the method of rewriting rules in the tree diagram analysis of syntactical theory, called PSG (Phrase-Structure Grammar). The study took 26 data in which 13 sentences were taken directly from The Lion and The Mouse and the other 13 sentences were taken from The Hare and The Tortoise. The data focused on analyzing the five types of sentence structure based on Burton’s theory including Noun Phrase, Verb Phrase, Adjective Phrase, Adverbial Phrase and Prepositional Phrase. The results showed that the noun phrase uses were found more dominant than the other types of sentence structure with the percentage 38%.

Pseudo-partitives in English: an HPSG analysis

Pseudo-partitives are strings of the form [N1– of – N2] in which N1denotes a quantity or amount of whatever it is that N2denotes and in which N2is a bare nominal. Such strings come in two types, depending on whether the combination shares thenumbervalue of N1or N2. The first type can be analyzed along familiar lines, but the second one is a hard nut to crack. The article presents existing treatments, showing that they all involve departures from independently motivated principles. As an alternative we propose an analysis that is cast in the Typed Feature Structure notation of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. It handles both types of pseudo-partitives, arguing that N1and the prepositionofare complement-selecting heads if thenumbervalue is shared with N1, while N1and the preposition are head-selecting functors if thenumbervalue is shared with N2. The switch from head to functor status is characteristic of grammaticalization and is shown to affect pseudo-partitives with a quantifier noun or a collection noun as N1, but not pseudo-partitives with a measure noun or collection noun. Examples and quantitative data are extracted from COCA.

20 years of the Grammar Matrix: cross-linguistic hypothesis testing of increasingly complex interactions

The Grammar Matrix project is a meta-grammar engineering framework expressed in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS). It automates grammar implementation and is thus a tool and a resource for linguistic hypothesis testing at scale. In this paper, we summarize how the Grammar Matrix grew in the last decade and describe how new additions to the system have made it possible to study interactions between analyses, both monolingually and cross-linguistically, at new levels of complexity.

The Syntactic Structure of an Introductory PP in Standard Arabic: A Non-Transformational Approach

The paper discusses the structure of a particular prepositional phrase (PP) that is commonly used in Standard Arabic, especially in formal contexts. This PP is used when a speaker wants to start an utterance with an expression that denotes a general observation or impression without referring to its source. It can be described as ‘an introductory PP’. It consists of the preposition min and its complement like the PP min al-mutawaqqaʕ which expresses a meaning similar to ‘it is expected that ...’. Syntactically, the occurrence of this introductory PP, compared with other PPs, is distinct in that it is restricted to three structural patterns. Although the use of this PP is common, its structure is still not studied thoroughly in the literature. Hence, the paper aims to contribute to the current linguistic research by exploring the structure of this introductory PP. The paper offers both a data-based description and a non-transformational analysis of the relevant linguistic properties of this PP and the constructions in which it occurs. The theoretical framework that is used here is Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar.

The Syntax of the Negation Marker Laa in Najdi Arabic: An HPSG Approach

Negation is considered one of the controversial cross-linguistic areas of research. One of its interesting topics is the syntax of negation markers. This paper aims to contribute to the current linguistic research in negation through exploring one of the negation markers in Najdi Arabic: the negator laa. It first categories laa into three types according to its meaning and the syntactic constructions in which it occurs: the imperative laa, the conjunct particle laa, and the clausal laa. The syntactic properties of each one of these are described with sufficient examples illustrating them. Where appropriate, these properties are compared to those of the negator laa in Standard Arabic and other negators. In addition to the syntactic description of laa in its three types or uses, the paper presents a theoretical account for all the relevant syntactic properties of each type of the negator laa by using the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar.

Syntax Acquisition in Healthy Adults and Post-Stroke Individuals: The Intriguing Role of Grammatical Preference, Statistical Learning, and Education.

Previous work has provided contrasting evidence on syntax acquisition. Syntax-internal factors, i.e., instinctive knowledge of the universals of grammar (UG) for finite-state grammar (FSG) and phrase-structure grammar (PSG) but also syntax-external factors such as language competence, working memory (WM) and demographic factors may affect syntax acquisition. This study employed an artificial grammar paradigm to identify which factors predicted syntax acquisition. Thirty-seven healthy individuals and forty-nine left-hemispheric stroke patients (fourteen with aphasia) read syllable sequences adhering to or violating FSG and PSG. They performed preference classifications followed by grammatical classifications (after training). Results showed the best classification accuracy for sequences adhering to UG, with performance predicted by syntactic competence and spatial WM. Classification of ungrammatical sequences improved after training and was predicted by verbal WM. Although accuracy on FSG was better than on PSG, generalization was fully possible only for PSG. Education was the best predictor of syntax acquisition, while aphasia and lesion volume were not predictors. This study shows a clear preference for UG, which is influenced by spatial and linguistic knowledge, but not by the presence of aphasia. Verbal WM supported the identification of rule violations. Moreover, the acquisition of FSG and PSG was related to partially different mechanisms, but both depended on education.

Obituary: Martin Kay

Obituary: Martin Kay

Insertion-deletion systems with substitutions I

In this paper, we discuss the addition of substitutions as a further type of operations to (in particular, context-free) insertion-deletion systems, i.e., in addition to insertions and deletions we allow single letter replacements to occur. We investigate the effect of the addition of substitution rules on the context dependency of such systems, thereby also obtaining new characterizations of and even normal forms for context-sensitive (CS) and recursively enumerable (RE) languages and their phrase-structure grammars. More specifically, we prove that for each RE language, there is a system generating this language that only inserts and deletes strings of length two without considering the context of the insertion or deletion site, but which may change symbols (by a substitution operation) by checking a single symbol to the left of the substitution site. When we allow checking left and right single-letter context in substitutions, even context-free insertions and deletions of single letters suffice to reach computational completeness. When allowing context-free insertions only, checking left and right single-letter context in substitutions gives a new characterization of CS. This clearly shows the power of this new type of rules.

Mixed computation

AbstractProof-theoretic models of grammar are based on the view that an explicit characterization of a language comes in the form of the recursive enumeration of strings in that language. That recursive enumeration is carried out by a procedure which strongly generates a set of structural descriptions Σ and weakly generates a set of strings S; a grammar is thus a function that pairs an element of Σ with elements of S. Structural descriptions are obtained by means of Context-Free phrase structure rules or via recursive combinatorics and structure is assumed to beuniform: binary branching trees all the way down. In this work we will analyse natural language constructions for which such a rigid conception of phrase structure is descriptively inadequate and propose a solution for the problem of phrase structure grammars assigning too much or too little structure to natural language strings: we propose that the grammar can oscillate between levels of computational complexity in local domains, which correspond to elementary trees in a lexicalised Tree Adjoining Grammar.

Pronominal Feature Re-assembly: L1 and L2 Pronoun Resolution of Spanish Epicene and Common Gender Antecedents

Abstract In this paper, we propose the implementation of a full-fledged feature-based lexicalist syntactic theory as a way to represent the possible configurations of features in the learner’s interlanguage and formalize a theory of acquisition based in feature reassembly. We describe gender agreement pronominal coindexation in Spanish using Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and use it to analyze the results of a self-paced reading test with L1 and L2 speakers. We find that the specification of the gender feature value at the syntactic level in epicene antecedents facilitates pronominal resolution in L1 Spanish speakers. Conversely, there is a cognitive cost when the gender feature is underspecified at the syntactic level in common gender antecedents; this cost is not found among L2 speakers. The detailed descriptions in terms of feature specification in the HPSG framework allow us to observe differences between the L1 and L2 grammars in fine-grained detail and represent optionality at the lexical level.

What participles are a mixture of

Abstract It is commonly assumed that participles show a mixture of verbal and adjectival properties, but the issue of how this mixed nature can best be captured is anything but settled. Analyses range from the purely adjectival to the purely verbal with various shades in between. This lack of consensus is at least partly due to the fact that participles are used in a variety of ways and that an analysis which fits one of them is not necessarily equally plausible for the other. In an effort to overcome the resulting fragmentation this paper proposes an analysis that covers all uses of the participles, from the adnominal over the predicative to the free adjunct uses, including also the nominalized ones. To keep it feasible we focus on one language, namely Dutch. With the help of a treebank we first identify the uses of the Dutch participles and describe their properties in informal terms. In a second step we provide an analysis in terms of the notation of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. A key property of the analysis is the differentiation between core uses and grammaticalized uses. The treatment of the latter is influenced by insights from Grammaticalization Theory.