Arnold M. Zwicky

Natural Language Parsing: Psychological, Computational, and Theoretical Perspectives

Introduction Laurie Karttunen and Arnold M. Zwicky 1. Measuring syntactic complexity relative to discourse context Alice Davison and Richard Lutz 2. Interpreting questions Elisabet Engdahl 3. How can grammars help parsers? Stephen Crain and Janet Dean Fodor 4. Syntactic complexity Lyn Frazier 5. Processing of sentences with intrasentential code switching Aravind K. Joshi 6. Tree adjoining grammars: how much context-sensitivity is required to provide reasonable structural descriptions Aravind K. Joshi 7. Parsing in functional unification grammar Martin Kay 8. Parsing in a free word order language Lauri Karttunen and Martin Kay 9. A new characterization of attachment preferences Fernando C. N. Pereira 10. On not being led up the garden path: the use of context by the pscyhological syntax processor Stephen Crain and Mark Steedman 11. Do listeners compute linguistic representations? Michael K. Tanenhaus, Greg N. Carlson and Mark S. Seidenberg Notes References Index.

Suppressing the Zs.

The label CLITIC has been applied to a wide variety of phenomena, from words that are prosodically dependent on neighbouring words (as are unaccented monosyllabic prepositions and personal pronouns in English) to words, or even individual morphemes, with idiosyncratic syntactic distributions (like the second-position pronominal and adverbial particles in many languages). I propose here to reserve the term for elements whose description requires more than the stipulation that they may or must be prosodically dependent.

The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax: four apparent counterexamples in French

The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax (PPFS) is a proposed universal principle of grammar that prohibits reference to phonological information in syntactic rules or constraints. Although many linguists have noted phenomena that appear to them to be in conflict with it, the appearances are misleading in all cases we have examined. This paper scrutinizes four instructive cases in French that appear to falsify the PPFS. Section 1 deals with the alleged relevance of syllable count to the description of attributive adjective placement; section 2 addresses the validity of a rule mentioning consonantality in stating the agreement rule for adverbial tout ; section 3 turns to the issue of preposition choice (e.g. en vs. au ) with geographical proper names; and section 4 takes a look at a purported case of phonological reference in stating the rule for ellipsis of a clitic pronoun and an auxiliary in a coordinate structure. In each case we bring independent evidence to bear on the problem in order to show that the analyses employing phonology-sensitive syntactic statements are in error and the prediction of the PPFS is confirmed.

Phonology in syntax: The Somali optional agreement rule

ConclusionThe conclusion we draw from our extended discussion of the interesting descriptive problem Hetzron provides is that Somali offers no support to the view his paper defended: that syntax and phonology are partially intermingled domains. Merely letting the agreement rules of Somali have access to phonological properties of morphemes would not, in any case, suffice for the statement Hetzron would like to make; as we have seen, no phonological properties of the relevant strings can be used to predict the occurrence of ‘playful agreement’; Hetzron does not even sketch a grammar-fragment that would achieve such prediction, and apparently this could not be done. An adequate account needs morphological features, and this does not need to make reference to phonology. Hetzrons point about the ‘playful’ character of the agreement possibilities with sub-plurals should really have been presented as a hypothesis about the historical development of Somali — a study of psychophonetic factors in syntactic change. It is crucial, however, to see that this is not the same as a hypothesis about the grammar of Somali. Speakers may be influenced by the sound of the sentences in their language when they go along with a tendency that leads to a change in the grammar; but that does not mean that syntactic rules in the grammar of a language can have phonological conditions. We claim, in fact, that in no language does any syntactic rule show sensitivity to phonological properties.

Deleting named morphemes

Abstract If the English informal style deletions (ISDs) illustrated in ((Are) you) going? are analyzed as the result of a (late) syntactic rule, theoretical embarrassments ensue concerning the relationship of syntax and phonology, the notion of surface structure, and the separation of cliticization from other syntax. But ISDs can delete proper parts of (phonological) words and are even fed by morphophonemic rules; these facts argue that ISDs are themselves morphological, in fact morphophonemic. We propose that, in general, deletions of named morphemes, whether ‘optional’ (like the ISDs) or obligatory, are morphological processes (either morpholexical or morphophonemic), not syntactic operations, and we speculate that this conclusion can be extended to cover all free deletion rules. The proposal is supported with cases from Sarcee, Swahili, Welsh, and Swedish, as well as an English case (of do deletion) in addition to ISDs.

A double regularity in the acquisition of English verb morphology

Sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation through Grant GN-534.1 from the Office of Science Information Service to the Computer and Information Science Research Center, The Ohio State University.

Introduction: syntactic influences on phonological rules

Phonological theory asks how phonological shapes are assigned to linguistic units. In this issue of the Phonology Yearbook we bring together examinations of the role that syntactic structure plays in this assignment. The focus is therefore on phenomena that have been labelled, in one framework or another, as external sandhi (as opposed to internal sandhi), phrase phonology (as opposed to word phonology), or postlexical phonology (as opposed to lexical phonology). We have organised the eleven articles into three groups. In the first group are four articles addressing the issue of what domains phonological rules apply in. There is no question that there are phonological rules applying in purely phonological, or prosodic, domains (P2 rules, in the terminology of Kaisse i985); rules traditionally classified as allophonic, in particular, are all of this sort. There is also no question that prosodic domains can be related to syntactic (and morphological) domains in systematic, though often rather complex ways, so that syntactic structure on many occasions influences the applicability of P2 rules but indirectly, via the mediation of the principles relating syntactic domains to prosodic domains. What is in question in our first group of articles is whether there are phonological rules subject to conditions that are best stated directly in terms of syntactic domains (Pi rules, in Kaisses terminology). Odden, for instance, defends a direct-reference approach to the analysis of some phenomena occurring within maximal projections in Kimatuumbi, arguing that a mediated-reference approach couched in terms of prosodic domains is inadequate. The three articles in our middle group explore a new approach to mediated-influence analyses of phonological rules that are sensitive to syntactic information; this is the end-based theory introduced by Selkirk

Remarks on directionality

This work was supported in part by the 1970 MSSB Advanced Research Seminar in Mathematical Linguistics, sponsored by the National Science Foundation through a grant to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, Calif., and held at The Ohio State University, and in part by National Science Foundation Grant GN-534 to the Computer and Information Science Research Center of the Ohio State University.

Three open questions in the theory of one-symbol Smullyan systems

are symbols in P. A theorem of S is any string which is either an axiom of S or is derivable from the axioms by a finite number of applications of (a) uniform substitution of non-null strings in K* for variables, and (b) modus ponens. A string ~ ~ K* is said to be B-generated by S if Bet is a theorem of S, and a set L is said to be generated by S if there is a B ~ P such that L is the set of all B-generated strings. These definitions are based on the presentation of elementary formal systems in Smullyan 1961.

Natural language parsing: Frontmatter

Introduction Laurie Karttunen and Arnold M. Zwicky 1. Measuring syntactic complexity relative to discourse context Alice Davison and Richard Lutz 2. Interpreting questions Elisabet Engdahl 3. How can grammars help parsers? Stephen Crain and Janet Dean Fodor 4. Syntactic complexity Lyn Frazier 5. Processing of sentences with intrasentential code switching Aravind K. Joshi 6. Tree adjoining grammars: how much context-sensitivity is required to provide reasonable structural descriptions Aravind K. Joshi 7. Parsing in functional unification grammar Martin Kay 8. Parsing in a free word order language Lauri Karttunen and Martin Kay 9. A new characterization of attachment preferences Fernando C. N. Pereira 10. On not being led up the garden path: the use of context by the pscyhological syntax processor Stephen Crain and Mark Steedman 11. Do listeners compute linguistic representations? Michael K. Tanenhaus, Greg N. Carlson and Mark S. Seidenberg Notes References Index.