Kyle Rawlins

Universal Decompositional Semantics on Universal Dependencies.

We present a framework for augmenting data sets from the Universal Dependencies project with Universal Decompositional Semantics. Where the Universal Dependencies project aims to provide a syntactic annotation standard that can be used consistently across many languages as well as a collection of corpora that use that standard, our extension has similar aims for semantic annotation. We describe results from annotating the English Universal Dependencies treebank, dealing with word senses, semantic roles, and event properties.

Using instruments to understand argument structure: Evidence for gradient representation.

The arguments of a verb are commonly assumed to correspond to the event participants specified by the verb. That is, drink has two arguments because drink specifies two participants: someone who drinks and something that gets drunk. This correspondence does not appear to hold, however, in the case of instrumental participants, e.g. John drank the soda with a straw. Verbs such as slice and write have been argued to specify an instrumental participant, even though instruments do not pattern like arguments given other criteria. In this paper, we investigated how instrumental verbs are represented, testing the hypothesis that verbs such as slice encode three participants in the same way that dative verbs such as lend encode three participants. In two experiments English-speakers reported their judgments about the number of participants specified by a verb, e.g., that drink specifies two participants. These judgments indicate that slice does not encode three distinct arguments. Nonetheless, some verbs were systematically more likely to elicit the judgment that the instrument is specified by the verb, a pattern that held across individual subjects. To account for these findings, we propose that instruments are not independent verbal arguments but are represented in a gradient away: an instrument may be a more or less salient part of the force exerted by an agent. These results inform our understanding of the relationship between argument structure and event representation, raising questions concerning the role of arguments in language processing and learning.

Similarity of wh-Phrases and Acceptability Variation in wh-Islands

In wh-questions that form a syntactic dependency between the fronted wh-phrase and its thematic position, acceptability is severely degraded when the dependency crosses another wh-phrase. It is well known that the acceptability degradation in wh-island violation ameliorates in certain contexts, but the source of this variation remains poorly understood. In the syntax literature, an influential theory – Featural Relativized Minimality – has argued that the wh-island effect is modulated exclusively by the distinctness of morpho-syntactic features in the two wh-phrases, but psycholinguistic theories of memory encoding and retrieval mechanisms predict that semantic properties of wh-phrases should also contribute to wh-island amelioration. We report four acceptability judgment experiments that systematically investigate the role of morpho-syntactic and semantic features in wh-island violations. The results indicate that the distribution of wh-island amelioration is best explained by an account that incorporates the distinctness of morpho-syntactic features as well as the semantic denotation of the wh-phrases. We argue that an integration of syntactic theories and perspectives from psycholinguistics can enrich our understanding of acceptability variation in wh-dependencies.

On Adverbs of (Space and) Time

This paper gives an account of adverbs such as “slowly” and “quickly” in a range of positions, focusing on their interaction with measure phrases in the comparative. To account for the unusual pattern of measure phrases, I arrive at a proposal with the following components: (i) such adverbs need to be treated as measure functions on events in a framework for gradable predicates, (ii) in combination with ‘non-quantized’ events, the measurement distributes over event structure, (iii) the distribution of types measure phrases follows from whether the measurement distributes or not, and consequently, from the aspectual properties of the modified phrase, and (iv) the notion of ‘manner’ involved in such adverbs emerges from distributivity. The analysis sheds new light on the notion of gradability across categories, and especially what it means for a modifier to contribute manner modification.

Ingredients of Instrumental Meaning

This paper presents an analysis of the English instrumental markers with and 15 verbal use. As with other thematic roles, the semantic generalizations encoded by the role Instrument have been difficult to precisely characterize. In this study, we analyze the distinct semantic contributions of with and use, illuminating several properties of instrumental meaning. In particular, use specifies that the agent must act intentionally, which we formalize as universal quantification over possible 20 worlds within a Montague-style compositional framework. By contrast, with encodes a constraint whereby an instrument is a direct extension of the force initiated by the agent. This analysis is most consistent with theories in which thematic roles are clusters of event properties, rather than categories defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions; our analysis does not make use of Instrument as a primi25 tive role.