Walt Detmar Meurers

On Partial Constituent Fronting in German

This paper presents a reevaluation of the choice between the two analyses for German partial fronting phenomena proposed in the literature, remnant movement and reanalysis. We show that the empirical arguments which were presented in favor of an extraction analysis are not convincing, and we provide empirical evidence supporting a reanalysis-like approach. Turning to a detailed data discussion, we compare three different kinds of partial constituents: verbal, adjectival, and nominal ones. Adjectival complements pattern with coherently selected verbal complements whereas nominal complements turn out to be less restricted. On the theoretical side, we show that a reanalysis-like theory can be given a formally precise rendering in the HPSG architecture in terms of a lexical argument-raising specification, which is already widely employed in HPSG analyses of coherence in Germanic and restructuring verbs in Romance languages. The account we propose generalizes previous HPSG approaches to partial complements of different categories and correctly predicts the interaction of (partial) VP topicalization with embedded partial NPs or APs.

Compiling HPSG type constraints into definite clause programs

We present a new approach to HPSG processing: compiling HPSG grammars expressed as type constraints into definite clause programs. This provides a clear and computationally useful correspondence between linguistic theories and their implementation. The compiler performs offline constraint inheritance and code optimization. As a result, we are able to efficiently process with HPSG grammars without having to hand-translate them into definite clause or phrase structure based systems.

Word problems: a review of linguistic and numerical factors contributing to their difficulty

Word problems (WPs) belong to the most difficult and complex problem types that pupils encounter during their elementary-level mathematical development. In the classroom setting, they are often viewed as merely arithmetic tasks; however, recent research shows that a number of linguistic verbal components not directly related to arithmetic contribute greatly to their difficulty. In this review, we will distinguish three components of WP difficulty: (i) the linguistic complexity of the problem text itself, (ii) the numerical complexity of the arithmetic problem, and (iii) the relation between the linguistic and numerical complexity of a problem. We will discuss the impact of each of these factors on WP difficulty and motivate the need for a high degree of control in stimuli design for experiments that manipulate WP difficulty for a given age group.

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

We provide a tripartite overview of HPSG, a constraint-based model-theoretic framework for grammatical representation widely used for both theoretical research and computational implementations of natural language grammars. We begin with a condensed survey of the descriptive machinery assumed in the theory, focusing on the feature-based encoding of grammatical properties and the form of constraints regulating the specification of values for these features in complex syntatic structures, with illustrations from various local and nonlocal dependencies exhibited in a range of grammatical constructions. The following section explores in some detail the logical and formal foundations of the descriptive apparatus, centered on the crucial ontological distinction between, on the one hand, formal objects embodying the properties of linguistic expressions, and on the other, descriptions of those objects. We conclude with a review of HPSG-based processing, including the motivations behind such work, the different computational approaches and systems, as well as current strands of research.