Predicate-argument Structure Research Articles

The semantics of ergative constructions in Zulu and Xhosa

In the African languages the nominative/accusative system is dominant, but these languages also exhibit an ergative case pattern. Both unaccusative and ergative constructions appear in a significant number of verbs in Xhosa and Zulu, as well as in other African languages like Venda and Sotho. This paper investigates these verbs with regard to their predicate argument structure and lexical conceptual structure.

Lexical choice for complex noun phrases: Structure, modifiers, and determiners

This paper presents a lexical choice component for complex noun phrases. We first explain why lexical choice for NPs deserves special attention within the standard pipeline architecture for a generator. The task of the lexical chooser for NPs is more complex than for clauses because the syntax of NPs is less understood than for clauses, and therefore, syntactic realization components, while they accept a predicate-argument structure as input for clauses, require a purely syntactic tree as input for NPs. The task of mapping conceptual relations to different syntactic modifiers is therefore left to the lexical chooser for NPs. The paper focuses on the syntagmatic aspect of lexical choice, identifying a process called planning. It focuses on a set of communicative goals that NPs can satisfy and specifies an interface between the different components of the generator and the lexical chooser. The technique presented for NP planning encapsulates a rich lexical knowledge and allows for the generation of a wide variety of syntactic constructions. It also allows for a large paraphrasing power because it dynamically maps conceptual information to various syntactic slots.

Actionality and mental imagery in children's comprehension of declaratives.

Previous work has demonstrated that children understand sentences with actional verbs better than nonactional verbs. This actionality effect has been reported to be restricted to passives and to be independent of experimental context. The present experiment was conducted with 48 French-speaking children aged 5; 0-7; 11. The actionality effect was studied by systematically varying the voice of the test sentences and the voice of the interpretive requests. Pictures corresponding or not to the predicate-argument structure of the sentences were presented to the subjects, who were independently classified as visualizers or nonvisualizers, in order to investigate the relation between sentence actionality and mental imagery. The interaction between actionality, voice of sentence, and interpretive request revealed that the actionality effect depends on the type of task used in order to assess comprehension, and that it can be reversed in some conditions. Our results also suggest that the actionality effect is linked to mental imagery. Visualizers demonstrated better comprehension of actional sentences than nonvisualizers, whereas the reverse was true for non-actional sentences. Mental image may serve as a support for the computations involved in sentence comprehension.

The status of verbal affixes in Bantu languages with special reference to Tsonga: problems and possibilities

Although the title may suggest that all verbal affixes will come under scrutiny, in this article an attempt is made to provide a unified treatment of affixes which affect the predicate argument structure of the verbs they are attached to, namely the applicative, causative, neutro-stative, passive and reflexive. Specifically, it is argued that these affixes are nothing more than verbal affixes which alter the predicate argument structure of the verbs they are attached to, by adding, binding or suppressing thematic roles.

The Organization of Predicate Argument Structure and Classification of English Verbs

The Organization of Predicate Argument Structure and Classification of English Verbs

Extraction out of NP in French

The distinction between complements which may be extracted out of NP and complements which may not is generally assumed to follow from the interaction of structural constraints such as Subjacency and the syntactic properties of the particular complements. I show here that extractable complements do not share a syntactic property which distinguishes them from non-extractable ones; in fact, their syntactic heterogeneity renders it difficult to propose a structural account at all. It is my contention that all extractable complements are the first argument in the NP, while non-extractable ones are either non-arguments or not the first argument. In order to show this, I explore the argument structure of NP in some detail, and will make proposals concerning predicate argument structures. I argue in particular for the distinction between two classes of N, those which specify syntactic properties for their arguments and those which leave them unspecified, and I propose that there exist not only lexical relations but also extrinsic relations.

On some proposals concerning the status of predicate-argument structure representations

On some proposals concerning the status of predicate-argument structure representations

Relational-grammar-based generation in the JETS Japanese-English machine translation system

This paper describes the design and function of the English generation phase in JETS, a minimal transfer, Japanese-English machine translation system that is based on the linguistic framework of relational grammar. To facilitate the development of relational grammar generators, we have built a generator shell that provides a high-level relational grammar rule-writing language and is independent of both the natural language and the application. The implemented English generator (called GENIE) maps abstract canonical structures, representing the basic predicate-argument structures of sentences, into well-formed English sentences via a two-stage plan-and-execute design. The modularity inherent in the plan-and-execute design permits the development of a very general and stable deterministic execution grammar. Another major feature of the GENIE generator is that it iscategory-driven, i.e., planning rules and execution rules are distributed over a part-of-speech hierarchy (down to individual lexical items) and are invoked via an inheritance mechanism only if appropriate for the category being processed. Categorydriven processing facilitates the handling of exceptions. The use of a syntactic planner and category-driven processing together provide a great deal of flexibility without sacrificing determinism in the generation process.

Predicate-argument structure as a link between linguistic and nonlinguistic representations

We present a study wherein a severe Broca's aphasic patient was trained to learn symbols representing both pure transitive and dative predicates—predicates differing in argument structure—in a visually based artificial language (c-ViC). We found a decrease in performance when two symbols, rather than one, were used to depict these “verbs.” However, this decrease in performance was more pronounced for symbols representing pure transitive verbs—those that allow only one argument structure—than for symbols representing dative verbs—those that allow two different argument structures. Also, dative “verbs” yielded better performance when they were inserted in more complex, three-argument “sentences” than when they were inserted in two-argument “sentences.” The opposite pattern was found for pure transitives. These results are discussed in terms of our claim that argument structure serves as a point of connection between linguistic information and non-linguistic visual information and in terms of the possibility that argument structure entries are shaped by the form in which visual information is parsed.

Some aspects of sentence production in aphasia

Abstract In this paper, we address the question of whether aphasic patients can produce complete predicate-argument structures. We present a descriptive framework for analyzing this particular aspect of output, and identify different patterns of deficit. We argue that specific output analyses along these lines are a necessary first step in the assessment and treatment of sentence production deficits.

Multiple subcategorization and the ?-criterion: The case of climb

We have successfully accounted for all the data of section 2 with the single unified entry (27). The price has been two innovations in the semantic structure of lexical items: the curly bracket notation for alternative realizations of variables, and the P operator. Each of these has been independently motivated. Returning to the general issue that motivated this study, we have maintained a strong correspondence between syntactic ϑ-positions and semantic argument positions. However, the correspondence need not be strictly one-to-one. We have seen multiple argument positions for a single ϑ-position in transitive climb, transaction verbs such as buy and sell, and possibly intransitive dress. We have also seen, possibly, that an argument may be multiply filled, once by a subcategorized phrase and once by a nonsubcategorized phrase. We have also seen that the correspondence between syntactic and semantic structure is encoded in lexical entries by means of principles more complex than seems to have been suspected. And the complexities we have found are for climb, which intuition suggests is a relatively simple item with rather transparent semantics. When we attempt to represent verbs with complicated options for sentential complementation (such as know and ask), we should expect the descriptive problems to multiply. Eventually, of course, one would like to adequately constrain the theory of syntax-semantics linkages in the lexicon. The present study should caution us, however, of the danger of applying Occam's razor too soon, thereby cutting off one's hand. This study has also provided evidence confirming Grimshaw's (1979) conclusion that syntactic and semantic conditions on lexical insertion are autonomous. Here we have ended with a lexical entry whose sole syntactic constraint is that there is a single postverbal complement. The syntactic category of the complement, however, is determined by the range of semantic categories possible in the corresponding variables. Viewed from a different angle, though, one might say that it is the availability of only one syntactic complement position that prevents both semantic variables from being expressed at once. There is nothing conceptually wrong with * Bill climbed the mountain up the ropes, in which both postverbal complements fill j-variables in (27) — it is just a syntactic fact about the English verb climb that makes it ungrammatical. To sum up, then, the subcategorization feature is not simply a projection of argument structure, as generally assumed. Rather, ϑ-structure and argument structure are better thought of as each constraining potential projections of the other. Finally, it is evident that these issues could not have been investigated without a fairly explicit theory of semantic structure like Conceptual Semantics. I hope to have provided here a taste of what syntactic theory may have missed out on, as a result of its habit of viewing semantics through the narrow window of more traditional formalizations of predicate-argument structure. I am grateful to Jane Grimshaw and David Olson for helpful discussion of this material, and to Jerrold Katz and especially another (anonymous) NLLT reviewer for many insightful comments on an earlier version. The puzzle of rent in section 4 goes back to discussions with Joe Emonds around 1966. This research was supported in part by NSF Grant IST-8120403 to Brandeis University, and in part by NSF Grant BNS-7622943 to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where my initial exploration of climb took place one typically glorious day in February 1984.