Louisa Sadler

Prenominal adjectives and the phrasal/lexical distinction

This paper aims to demonstrate that there is no adequate treatment of adjectives in NP in English, and attempts to remedy this. The central problem is to account for the syntactic and semantic differences between prenominal and postnominal adjectival constructions as in (i)–(iv): (i) the navigable river (ii) the rivers navigable (iii) *the navigable by boat rivers (iv) the rivers navigable by boat Existing treatments are reviewed, and a novel analysis proposed whereby the structures in (ii) and (iv) are normal syntactic N-AP structures, but prenominally, adjectives form what we call ‘small’ syntactic constructions (X° constructions, with X° daughters) which have some properties in common with lexical/morphological constructions. If the analysis is right, it poses a serious challenge to the view that there is a strict separation of lexical and syntactic aspects of grammar: grammatical theory should recognize a kind of construction which is neither fully syntactic nor fully lexical, but has properties of both.

Syntax as an exponent of morphological features

In this paper we investigate a selection of issues in the morphology-syntax interface. This has been the locus of intense research activity in recent years particularly within lexicalist theories of grammar such as Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). A central question addressed in LFG is the way that across languages or within a single language a whole host of morphological, lexical and syntactic means can be deployed to express essentially the same set of meanings or functions. One very specific example of this is seen when very similar (or even identical) grammatical meanings/functions are sometimes expressed by inflected morphological word forms and sometimes by means of syntactic constructions, that is, when a single set of grammatical properties receives synthetic and analytic expression within the same language. 1

Evaluation: An assessment

The primary aim of this contribution is to provide an editorial introduction to this Special Issue ofMachine Translation dedicated to Evaluation. The intention is to describe the rationale for the Issue, outline the various contributions of the papers in this issue, and try to situate them in a wider context. As part of providing this wider context, we give an overview and assessment of the main current approaches to Evaluation of Natural Language Processing, and especially Machine Translation systems.

From Treebank Resources to LFG F-Structures

We present two companion methods for automatically enriching phrase-structure oriented treebank resources with functional structures. Both methods define systematic patterns of correspondence between partial PS configurations and functional structures. These are applied to PS rules extracted from treebanks, or to flat term representations of treebank trees.

Structural non-correspondence in translation

Kaplan et al (1989) present an approach to machine translation based on co-description. In this paper we show that the notation is not as natural and expressive as it appears. We first show that the most natural analysis proposed in Kaplan et al (1989) cannot in fact cover the range of data for the important translational phenomenon in question. This contribution extends the work reported on in Sadler et al (1989) and Sadler et al (1990). We then go on to discuss alternatives which depart from or extend the formalism proposed in Kaplan et al (1989) in various respects, pointing out some directions for further research. The strategies discussed have been implemented.

The theoretical basis of MiMo

The purpose of this paper is to describe and motivate the leading ideas behind the MiMo notation, a formalism for transfer-based machine translation which is especially appropriate for intermediate representations based on Dependency Grammar. The most important of these ideas concern properties of the translation relation such as compositionality, reversibility, modularity, and autonomy of levels of description. The final section considers some issues relating to rule interaction.

Indeterminacy by underspecification

We examine the formal encoding of feature indeterminacy, focussing on case indeterminacy as an exemplar of the phenomenon. Forms that are indeterminately specified for the value of a feature can simultaneously satisfy conflicting requirements on that feature and thus are a challenge to constraint-based formalisms which model the compatibility of information carried by linguistic items by combining or integrating that information. Much previous work in constraint-based formalisms has sought to provide an analysis of feature indeterminacy by departing in some way from vanilla assumptions either about feature representations or about how compatibility is checked by integrating information from various sources. In the present contribution we argue instead that a solution to the range of issues posed by feature indeterminacy can be provided in a vanilla feature-based approach which is formally simple, does not postulate special structures or objects in the representation of case or other indeterminate features, and requires no special provision for the analysis of coordination. We view the value of an indeterminate feature such as case as a complex and possibly underspecified feature structure. Our approach correctly allows for incremental and monotonic refinement of case requirements in particular contexts. It uses only atomic boolean-valued features and requires no special mechanisms or additional assumptions in the treatment of coordination or other phenomena to handle indeterminacy. Our account covers the behaviour of both indeterminate arguments and indeterminate predicates, that is, predicates placing indeterminate requirements on their arguments.

A morphomic account of a syncretism in Russian deverbal nominalizations

In this paper we examine the morphology of the Russian verb system.1/2 We propose that a curious morphological restriction on the formation of certain types of deverbal nominalization provides indirect, but compelling, evidence in favour of a realizational approach to Russian conjugation over a morpheme based approach of the kind prevalent in recent generative studies of Slavic. The basic idea is very simple: the generalization which we discuss can be easily handled in a realizational framework by means of a rule of referral. However, in a morpheme based model, it is impossible to state the facts without violating locality principles and the full generalization is impossible to state even if these principles are violated.

Case stacking in realizational morphology

Abstract Case stacking, the phenomenon whereby a single word may bear multiple cases reflecting its relation to a number of different syntactic elements, is an important phenomenon both for the development of theories of inflectional morphology and for our understanding of the relation between morphology and syntax. However, to date it has received virtually no attention from theoretical morphology. Working within the inferential-realizational framework of paradigm function morphology (PFM), we provide a morphological analysis of the phenomenon of case stacking as found in the Australian Aboriginal languages Kayardild (Tangkic) and Martuthunira (Pama-Nyungan). We argue that the standard assumptions concerning morphological property sets in PFM are too weak to satisfactorily accommodate case stacking morphology, and we propose that (in some languages) the morphological property sets which define paradigm cells are structured rather than being the simple objects of the standard view. We show how this provides a comprehensive analysis of the complex case and number stacking facts and further, allows for a straightforward (although nontrivial) mapping between the morphology and the syntax as outlined in Sadler and Nordlinger (2004).

Lexical rules: what are they?

Horizontal redundancy is inherent to lexica consisting of descriptions of fully formed objects. This causes an unwelcome expansion of the lexical database and increases parsing time. To climinate it, direct relations between descriptions of fully formed objects are often defined. These are additional to the (Typed Multiple) Inheritance Network which already structures the lexicon. Many implementations of horizontal relations, however, fail to generate lexical entries on a needs-driven basis, so eliminate neither the problem of lexicon expansion nor that of inefficient parsing. Alternatively, we propose that lexical entries are descriptions of objects open to contextual specification of their properties on the basis of constraints defined within the type system. This guarantees that only those grammatical lexical entries are infered that are needed for efficient parsing. The proposal is extremely modest, making use of only basic inference power and expressivity.