Ash Asudeh

The logic of pronominal resumption

1. Introduction PART I BACKGROUND 2. Resumption 3. Lexical-Functional Grammar 4. Glue Semantics PART II THEORY 5. The Resource Sensitivity Hypothesis 6. The Resoucre Management Theory of Resumption PART III SYNTACTICALLY ACTIVE RESUMPTIVES 7. Irish 8. Hebrew PART IV SYNTACTICALLY INACTIVE RESUMPTIVES 9. Swedish 10. Vata PART V OTHER KINDS OF RESUMPTION 11. Resumption and Processing 12. Copy Raising 13. Conclusion PART VI APPENDICES Bibliography Index

Probabilistic Learning Algorithms and Optimality Theory

This article provides a critical assessment of the Gradual Learning Algorithm (GLA) for probabilistic optimality-theoretic (OT) grammars proposed by Boersma and Hayes (2001). We discuss the limitations of a standard algorithm for OT learning and outline how the GLA attempts to overcome these limitations. We point out a number of serious shortcomings with the GLA: (a) A methodological problem is that the GLA has not been tested on unseen data, which is standard practice in computational language learning. (b) We provide counterexamples, that is, attested data sets that the GLA is not able to learn. (c) Essential algorithmic properties of the GLA (correctness and convergence) have not been proven formally. (d) By modeling frequency distributions in the grammar, the GLA conflates the notions of competence and performance. This leads to serious conceptual problems, as OT crucially relies on the competence/performance distinction.

Expressives and Identity Conditions

EXPRESSIVES AND IDENTITY CONDITIONS Christopher Potts Ash Asudeh Seth Cable Yurie Hara Eric McCready Luis Alonso-Ovalle Rajesh Bhatt Christopher Davis Angelika Kratzer Tom Roeper Martin Walkow Müller, Gereon. 2004. Verb-second as vP-first. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 7:179–234. Nilsen, Øystein. 2003. Eliminating positions. Doctoral dissertation, OTS, Utrecht. Pafel, Jürgen. 1998. Skopus und logische Struktur. Arbeitspapiere des Sonderforschungsbereichs 340, Bericht 129. Tübingen/Stuttgart: University of Tübingen/University of Stuttgart. Reinhart, Tanya. 1983. Anaphora and semantic interpretation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sauerland, Uli, and Paul Elbourne. 2002. Total reconstruction, PF movement, and derivational order. Linguistic Inquiry 33: 283–319. Thiersch, Craig. 1985. Some notes on scrambling in the German Mittelfeld, VP and X-bar theory. Ms., University of Connecticut, Storrs, and University of Cologne.

Control and semantic resource sensitivity

This paper examines tensions between the syntax of control and semantic resource sensitivity. Structure sharing of controller and control target leads to apparent RESOURCE DEFICIT under certain circumstances. An analysis is presented using Glue Semantics for Lexical Functional Grammar. It demonstrates that structure sharing and resource sensitivity can be reconciled without giving up or relaxing either notion. It is shown that the analysis can handle either property or propositional denotations for controlled complements. The analysis is extended to finite controlled complements, which raise the opposing problem of RESOURCE SURPLUS . A solution is proposed and its typological implications discussed. The syntax and semantics of control as structure sharing is compared to a recent anaphoric control analysis by Dalrymple (2001). Based on facts of exhaustive and partial control, the present analysis is argued to be superior.

Constructions with Lexical Integrity

Construction Grammar holds that unpredictable form-meaning combinations are not restricted in size. In particular, there may be phrases that have particular meanings that are not predictable from the words that they contain, but which are nonetheless not purely idiosyncratic. In addressing this observation, some construction grammarians have not only weakened the word/phrase distinction, but also denied the lexicon/grammar distinction. In this paper, we consider the word/phrase and lexicon/grammar distinction in light of Lexical-Functional Grammar and its Lexical Integrity Principle. We show that it is not necessary to remove the word/phrase distinction or the lexicon/grammar distinction to capture constructional effects, although we agree that there are important generalizations involving constructions of all sizes that must be captured at both syntactic and semantic levels. We use LFG’s templates , bundles of grammatical descriptions, to factor out grammatical information in such a way that it can be invoked either by words or by construction-specific phrase structure rules. Phrase structure rules that invoke specific templates are thus the equivalent of phrasal constructions in our approach, but Lexical Integrity and the separation of word and phrase are preserved. Constructional effects are captured by systematically allowing words and phrases to contribute comparable information to LFG’s level of functional structure; this is just a generalization of LFG’s usual assumption that “morphology competes with syntax” (Bresnan, 2001).

Automatic extraction of translations from web-based bilingual materials

This paper describes the framework of the StatCan Daily Translation Extraction System (SDTES), a computer system that maps and compares web-based translation texts of Statistics Canada (StatCan) news releases in the StatCan publication The Daily. The goal is to extract translations for translation memory systems, for translation terminology building, for cross-language information retrieval and for corpus-based machine translation systems. Three years of officially published statistical news release texts at http://www.statcan.ca were collected to compose the StatCan Daily data bank. The English and French texts in this collection were roughly aligned using the Gale-Church statistical algorithm. After this, boundary markers of text segments and paragraphs were adjusted and the Gale-Church algorithm was run a second time for a more fine-grained text segment alignment. To detect misaligned areas of texts and to prevent mismatched translation pairs from being selected, key textual and structural properties of the mapped texts were automatically identified and used as anchoring features for comparison and misalignment detection. The proposed method has been tested with web-based bilingual materials from five other Canadian government websites. Results show that the SDTES model is very efficient in extracting translations from published government texts, and very accurate in identifying mismatched translations. With parameters tuned, the text-mapping part can be used to align corpus data collected from official government websites; and the text-comparing component can be applied in prepublication translation quality control and in evaluating the results of statistical machine translation systems.

With Lexical Integrity

Muller and Wechsler (MW) contrast lexical (lexicalist) and phrasal (constructional) approaches and conclude that a lexical approach is to be preferred. They present a careful review of the arguments that have been presented for both positions, and they also introduce several new arguments for the lexicalist position. The target article is commendable in many respects, including its thoroughness. However, their representation of our position on Lexical Integrity and constructions is not accurate (Asudeh, Dalrymple, and Toivonen 2008, 2013),1 and they use too broad a brush in painting their picture of Germanic motion constructions; sections 2 and 3 below deal respectively with these issues.

Symptomatic imperfections David Adger, Core syntax: a Minimalist approach . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+424. Andrew Radford, Minimalist syntax: exploring the structure of English . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii+512.

Minimalist syntax and Core syntax are reasonably good textbooks. They should be very helpful indeed in teaching a syntax course on current Principles and Parameters theory (PP Chomsky 1981) that focuses on the Minimalist Program (MP; Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2001, 2004, 2005). The books present a range of syntactic phenomena, which are for the most part discussed lucidly and illustrated by considerable relevant data. Nevertheless, the books are not pedagogically faultless and the pedagogical faults are often due to underlying theoretical problems.

Monads as a Solution for Generalized Opacity

In this paper we discuss a conservative extension of the simply-typed lambda calculus in order to model a class of expressions that generalize the notion of opaque contexts. Our extension is based on previous work in the semantics of programming languages aimed at providing a mathematical characterization of computations that produce some kind of side effect (Moggi, 1989), and is based on the notion of monads, a construction in category theory that, intuitively, maps a collection of “simple” values and “simple” functions into a more complex value space, in a canonical way. The main advantages of our approach with respect to traditional analyses of opacity are the fact that we are able to explain in a uniform way a set of different but related phenomena, and that we do so in a principled way that has been shown to also explain other linguistic phenomena (Shan, 2001).

Response to David Adger's ‘Remarks on Minimalist feature theory and Move’

David Adger raises some interesting issues and makes several valuable points in his ‘Remarks on Minimalist feature theory and Move’ (henceforth MFTM), a response to our review article ‘Symptomatic imperfections’ (henceforth SI) in this journal (Asudeh & Toivonen 2006), which was in part a review of his Core syntax (Adger 2003). In this response, we address some of the points in MFTM. We would also like to set the record straight about some points in SI which we feel have been misrepresented. In several instances, MFTM argues against claims that were not made in SI. Whatever the independent merit of these arguments, we do not wish to defend viewpoints we did not propose in the first place. We argue in SI that the low standard of formal rigour and explicitness in the Minimalist Program (MP) is problematic. Adger agrees with our assertion that various formalisations of Minimalism, including Stabler (1998), have been ignored in the mainstream MP literature, including Core syntax (CS). However, he claims that this is ‘beside the point ’. Adger writes :