March 2007 Bulletin

Sat Mar 31 21:19:11 UTC 2007

LFG BULLETIN
MARCH 2007

** Please send bulletin items to me by email  **
** (reverse: carleton.ca !at! ash_asudeh)    **

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LFG website:
http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/LFG/

International Lexical Functional Grammar Association:
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/lfg/ilfga/

More about LFG (old boilerplate section):
http://www.carleton.ca/~asudeh/LFG/more.txt

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CONTENTS

1. Louise Mycock awarded Robins Prize by the Philological Society
2. LFG 2006 Proceedings: Table of Contents
3. LSA Linguistic Institute 2007
4. LFG at the LSA Institute
5. Recent LFG work
6. Reminder of boilerplate policy

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1. ROBINS PRIZE

 From Nigel Vincent:

Louise Mycock of the University of Manchester, who before Christmas  
submitted and successfully defended her PhD on an LFG approach to the  
typology of constituent questions, has recently been announced as the  
winner of the 4th R.H. Robins Prize awarded by the Philological  
Society. This prize is awarded biennially for the best essay  
submitted by a doctoral student from anywhere in the world in any  
area of linguistics or philology. To qualify the winning essay must  
also be judged of a sufficiently high standard to be published in the  
Society's Transactions.  Louise wins a cheque for £500. Her essay  
will appear as an article in Transactions of the Philological Society  
Vol 106 (2008).

CONGRATULATIONS, LOUISE!

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2. LFG 2006 PROCEEDINGS

[Reminder: The LFG 2007 conference will be at Stanford, July 28-30]

The Proceedings for the LFG 2006 conference are nearing completion  
and will appear shortly at:

http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/LFG/11/lfg06.html

The Table of Contents is:

Ahmed, Tafseer    1-13
Spatial, Temporal and Structural Usages of Urdu ko

Asudeh, Ash and Ida Toivonen  13-29
Expletives  and the Syntax and Semantics of Copy Raising

Bashir, Elena  30-50
Evidentiality  in South Asian Languages

Broadwell, George Aaron  51-70
Alignment, Precedence and the Typology of Pied-Piping with Inversion

Chatsiou, Aikaterini  71-90
On the  Status of Resumptive Pronouns  in Modern Greek Restrictive
Relative Clauses

Grzegorz Chrupala and Josef van Genabith    91-106
Improving Treebank-Based Automatic LFG Induction for Spanish

Cook, Philippa  107-123
The German Infinitival Passive: A Case for Oblique  Functional  
Controllers?

Cook, Philippa and John Payne  124-144
Information Structure and Scope in German

Crouch, Dick and Tracy Holloway King  145-165
Semantics via F-Sructure Rewriting

Denis, Pascal and Jonas Kuhn  166-183
Applying an LFG Parser in Coreference Resolution: Experiments and  
Analysis

Falk, Yehuda  184-201
On the Representation of Case and Agreement

Finn, Ríona, Mary Hearne, Andy Way and Josef van Genabith  202-221
GF-DOP: Grammatical Feature Data-Oriented Parsing

Forst, Martin  222-239
COMP in (parallel) Grammar Writing

Fortmann, Christian 240-255
The Complement of verba dicendi Parentheticals

Hurst, Peter 256-274
The Syntax of the Malagasy Reciprocal Construction: An LFG Account

Kelling, Carmen 275-288
Spanish se-Constructions : The Passive and the Impersonal Construction

Kibort, Anna 289-309
On Three Different Types of Subjectlessness and how to Model them in LFG

Mayer, Elisabeth 310-327
Optional Direct Object Clitic Doubling in Limeño Spanish

Mayo, Bruce 328-342
A Computational Architecture for Lexical Insertion of Complex Nonce  
Words

Mittendorf, Ingo and Louisa Sadler 343-364
A Treatment of Welsh Initial Mutations

Montaut, Annie 365-385
The Evolution of the Tense-Aspect System in Hindi/Urdu: The Status of
the Ergative  Alignment

Ørsnes, Bjarne 386-405
Creating Raising Verbs: An LFG Analysis of the Complex Passive in Danish

Jeeyoung Peck and Peter Sells 406-415
Preposition Incorporation in Mandarin: Economy within VP

Rákosi, György 416-436
On the Need for a More Refined Approach to the Argument-Adjunct
Distinction:  The Case of Dative Experiencers in Hungarian

Sadler, Louisa and Rachel Nordlinger 437-454
Apposition as Coordination:  Evidence from Australian Languages

Sells, Peter 455-473
Using Subsumption rather than Equality in Functional Control

Stephens, Nola M. 474-484
Norwegian When-Clauses

Tamm, Anne 485-504
Estonian Transitive Verbs and Object Case

Torn, Reeli 504-515
Oblique Dependents in Estonian: An LFG Perspective

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3. LSA Linguistic Institute 2007

Website: http://linginst07.stanford.edu/

The next LSA Linguistic Institute will be held from July 1-27, 2007,  
at Stanford University. Presession (introductory) courses will be  
offered July 1-3, followed by regular session courses July 5-27. The  
theme of the institute is 'Empirical Foundations for Theories of  
Language'. There are far too many courses of relevance to LFG to list  
here; please see the website.

The institute Director is Peter Sells and the Associate Directors are  
Juliette Blevins, Eve Clark, Dan Jurafsky, Beth Levin, and Ivan Sag.

Please note the following collocated special events, in particular  
the LFG and HPSG conferences:

a) INSTITUTE LECTURES:

July 10: Hale Lecture
Marianne Mithun, University of California, Santa Barbara

July 17: Collitz Lecture
Asko Parpola, University of Helsinki

July 24: Sapir Lecture
Joan Bresnan, Stanford University

b) FORUM LECTURES:

July 8: William Labov, University of Pennsylvania

July 15: Elissa Newport, University of Rochester

July 22: Harald Baayen, MPI-Nijmegen

c) SPECIAL EVENT:

July 20-22: Mini-Course on Mixed-Effects Statistical Modelling.  
Harald Baayen, MPI-Nijmegen.

d) WORKSHOPS:

July 6-8: Variation, gradience and frequency in Phonology (Arto Anttila)

July 13-15:
Towards the Interoperability of Language Resources (EMELD) (Arienne  
Dwyer and Helen Aristar-Dry)

Grammar Engineering Across Frameworks (Emily Bender and Tracy  
Holloway King)

New Techniques in Sound Pattern Research (Diana Archangeli and Jeff  
Mielke)

July 14: Ethnographic Methods in Sociocultural Linguistics (Mary  
Bucholtz and Kira Hall)

July 17-19: Alternative Approaches to Language Classification (Philip  
Baldi)

July 21: Empirical approaches to morphological case (Cathryn Donohue  
and Jóhanna Barddal)

July 21-22: 2nd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Arabic Script- 
based Languages (Ali Farghaly and Karine Megerdoomian)

e) CONFERENCES:

July 20-22: 14th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase  
Structure
July 28-30: 12th International Lexical-Functional Grammar Conference

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4. LFG AT THE LSA INSTITUTE

The following are LFG-oriented events and courses at the 2007 LSA  
Institute at Stanford that I've identified on a somewhat ad hoc basis  
(see note).

[Note: I haven't included everything that could potentially be 'of  
interest' to LFGers, because there would be far too much -- basically  
everything! Since I can't predict the exact content of courses, my  
general methodology was to pick courses taught by people with a  
strong association with the LFG community, based on information from  
the institute's web site. My apologies if I've left anyone or  
anything out.]

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4.1 Conference

July 28-30: 12th International Lexical-Functional Grammar Conference

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4.2 Sapir Lecture

July 24, 7:30 PM, Kresge Auditorium: Joan Bresnan, Stanford University

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4.3 Workshops

July 13-15: Grammar Engineering Across Frameworks (Emily Bender and  
Tracy Holloway King)

July 25: Empirical approaches to morphological case (Cathryn Donohue  
and Jóhanna Barthdal)

								* --- *

4.4 Presession Courses

There are a large number of courses introducing various aspects of  
experimental or empirical methodology, formal and computational  
tools, and various linguistic theories. See: http:// 
linginst07.stanford.edu/courses.html#presession

LSA.105P |  Introduction to LFG
Mary Dalrymple (9:30-11:30 AM)

This course will provide an introduction to Lexical Functional  
Grammar, a constraint-based, lexicalist theory of grammar. LFG  
assumes that different aspects of linguistic structure are best  
analyzed in terms of linguistic representations which are related by  
functional correspondences and whose formal character faithfully  
reflects the nature of the data being represented. After an  
introduction to the formal architecture and basic concepts and tools  
of LFG, we will discuss the LFG treatment of a set of representative  
syntactic phenomena, including long-distance dependencies and raising/ 
control.

Course Areas: Morphology/Syntax

								* --- *

4.5 Regular Session Courses

LSA.309 |  Constraint-Based Generative Syntax
Ash Asudeh, Ida Toivonen (T/F 1:30-3:30 PM)

This course examines points of convergence and divergence within  
constraint-based, lexicalist theories of syntax (particularly Lexical  
Functional Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar) and  
between these theories and modern transformational grammar  
(particularly the Minimalist Program in Principles and Parameters  
Theory). Our aim is an honest assessment of the strengths and  
weaknesses of these different approaches to generative grammar,  
hopefully with lively and substantial discussion. Students' skills in  
constraint-based syntactic analysis will be developed through problem  
sets. We will consider various empirical phenomena and their  
theoretical consequences, higher-level theoretical issues, and the  
analytic consequences of grammatical architecture. Examples of higher- 
level issues are modularity, movement, empty categories,  
constructions, the syntax-semantics interface, locality, and  
linearization. Relevant empirical phenomena include head-argument  
relations (e.g. agreement, case), local dependencies (e.g., raising,  
control), and unbounded dependencies.

Course Areas: Morphology/Syntax

Prerequisites: At least an introductory syntax class; deep knowledge  
of constraint-based theories is not required.

LSA.341 |  Paraphrase and Usage
Annie Zaenen, Catherine O'Connor, Thomas Wasow (M/TH 10-12 PM)
Studies of grammatical alternations--variant ways of expressing the  
same proposition-- give rise to questions about why speakers choose  
one alternant over another. The recent availability of annotated  
corpora has made possible a new approach to investigating choice  
within alternations such as active/passive, dative, genitive, or  
dislocation constructions, among others. Current studies reveal  
correlations between construction choice and such factors as length  
or syntactic weight, information status, animacy, semantics of the  
relevant phrasal head, and predictability. Such studies may shed  
light on issues such as the theoretical significance of probabilistic  
variations in linguistic form, the nature of information structure  
constraints on syntactic form, and the role of processing constraints  
in grammatical change. We will present current work on this topic in  
lecture format; several problem sets will give students hands-on  
experience with at least one major corpus and several analytical  
tools currently in use. Related research focusing on lexical variants  
will be covered in LSA.376, Choosing a variant: Unfree variation.

Course Areas: Empirical Methods, Language Variation, Morphology/Syntax

Prerequisites: At least one course in syntax. A course in semantics  
would also be useful, but is not required.

LSA.342 |  Pattern-based Models of Lexical Knowledge
Farrell Ackerman, Jim Blevins, Fermín Moscoso del Prado Martín,  
Michael Tomasello (T/F 3:30-5:30 PM)
This course examines a number of mutually-reinforcing perspectives on  
the role that lexical exemplars and general pattern-matching  
processes play in systems of lexical and morphological knowledge. The  
course is designed to span a number of traditional boundaries to  
highlight the recent convergence of traditional models of  
morphological structure, usage-based theories of lexical acquisition  
and information-theoretic approaches to lexical processing. The first  
part of the course will introduce students to traditional analyses of  
morphological systems in which the form variation within a language  
is represented by means of sets of exemplary patterns. The second  
part introduces usage-based models of lexical acquisition and  
highlights the role that individual constructions and word tokens  
play in lexical islands. The third part summarizes the evidence for  
effects of inflectional and derivational paradigms on word  
recognition response latencies and explains how psycholinguistic  
evidence for the influence of lexical and morphemic paradigms on  
human lexical processing argues in favor of experience-based models  
of the mental lexicon. In addition, this component of the course will  
introduce the statistical tools that are used for characterizing  
these effects and for drawing consequences about the underlying  
system of knowledge.

Course Areas: Computational Linguistics, Morphology/Syntax, Language  
Acquisition, Empirical Methods, Experimental Methods

Prerequisites: Introduction to morphology; Introduction to syntax.

LSA.347 |  Rethinking Linguistic Competence
Joan Bresnan (T/F 10-12 PM)

Current theories of human language are widely based on the  
simplifying assumptions that knowledge of language is characterized  
by a static, categorical system of grammar for which grammaticality  
judgments offer the richest source of evidence. This idealization has  
been fruitful, but it ultimately underestimates human language  
capacities. Speakers of a language have powerful predictive  
capabilities that enable them to anticipate the linguistic choices of  
others by instantaneously weighing multiple sources of information.  
Linguistic manipulations that raise or lower probability can be shown  
to influence grammaticality judgments. These facts support an  
alternative view of linguistic competence as inherently variable and  
stochastic in nature, rather than categorical and algebraic. Even in  
the adult individual, grammar is a highly plastic cognitive system  
sensitively tuned to the probabilities of the environment. This  
course will trace several lines of evidence for this rethinking of  
linguistic competence in the domain of syntax.

Course Areas: Morphology/Syntax, Empirical Methods

LSA.373 |  Introduction to Morphology
Andrew Spencer (M/TH 8-10 AM)
This course presents the principal concepts underlying contemporary  
work in morphology. It emphasises realizational models, but the key  
ideas are important to all aspects of morphology and all types of  
morphological theory. We begin by investigating what is meant by  
"word", including the concept of the lexeme, its structure, and how  
lexemes are related to each other. We then turn to the kinds of  
inflectional systems found cross-linguistically, paying particular  
attention to the notion of syncretism. With this descriptive  
background, we look at paradigm-based approaches to inflectional  
morphology, starting with Stump's Paradigm Function Morphology,  
introducing the crucial notions "realization/exponence" and  
"default", and the important but controversial notion in such models  
of "stem." After a brief survey of clitic systems and their relation  
to inflectional morphology, we conclude by considering the  
implications of the issues raised for approaches to the morphology- 
syntax interface. Throughout we approach the conceptual and  
theoretical ideas by examining detailed data sets from a wide variety  
of language types, and students are expected to analyse such data  
sets between classes.

Course Areas: Morphology/Syntax

Prerequisites: Prerequisites: Basic level linguistics (some prior  
knowledge of elementary morphology will be helpful but not essential).

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5. RECENT LFG WORK

5.1 Recent and Forthcoming LFG Publications

Joan Bresnan, Ashwini Deo, and Devyani Sharma.  2006.  Typology in  
Variation: A Probabilistic Approach to be and n't in the Survey of  
English Dialects. To appear in English Language and Linguistics.

								* --- *

Dalrymple, Mary and Irina Nikolaeva. 2006.  Syntax of natural and  
accidental coordination: Evidence from agreement.  Language 82(4):  
824-849.

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6. Reminder of boilerplate policy

There has traditionally been a lot of boilerplate (standard text) at  
the end of every bulletin. This has made the bulletin somewhat longer  
than necessary and some of the information is becoming (I suspect)  
out of date.

I have moved the boilerplate to:

http://www.carleton.ca/~asudeh/LFG/more.txt

The  LFG website also serves much of the same function as the  
boilerplate section.

http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/LFG/