LFG Bulletin, July 2012

Tue Jul 31 18:13:31 UTC 2012

LFG BULLETIN
July 2012

** Please send bulletin items to me by email  **
** < Louise.Mycock "at" gmail "dot" com >**

Next issue: September 2012

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

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

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

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CONTENTS

1. Remembering Yehuda Falk
2. LFG 2012 Conference, Udayana University, Bali, Indonesia
3. LFG Bibliography
4. Drafts for comments
5. Recent LFG work
6. Boilerplate

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1. REMEMBERING YEHUDA FALK

It was with great sadness that the LFG community learnt of the recent passing of Professor Yehuda Falk.

From Joan Bresnan:

Remembering Yehuda Falk

I first met Yehuda Falk when he entered graduate school in linguistics at MIT in the early 1980s. He had studied with Ray Jackendoff as an undergraduate at Brandeis University. While still a young graduate student, he made several brilliant contributions to syntactic theory (Falk 1983a,b, and 1984). His proposed theory factoring apart linear order and dominance relations in constituent structure (1983a) was a major advance, adopted in various syntactic frameworks including GPSG, LFG, and GB. He also contributed a major study of the English auxiliary system, which was published in the journal Language (1984). In this study he argued persuasively for a mixed analysis of English auxiliaries as complement-taking verbs and analytical exponents of tense, and he also proposed the first functional category at the clause level, again anticipating developments in syntactic theory by a number of years. I left MIT for Stanford before Yehuda Falk embarked on his dissertation. It was a delight to renew our acquaintance in 1998 at the LFG conference in Brisbane, Australia, where he gave a paper. Since then he became a frequent contributor to LFG, giving conference presentations in 2000 (Berkeley), 2001 (Hong Kong), 2002 (Athens), 2003 (Saratoga Springs), 2004 (Christchurch), 2005 (Bergen), 2006 (Konstanz), 2007 (Stanford), 2009 (Cambridge), 2010 (Ottawa), and 2011 (Hong Kong), where I last spoke with him. He was the moderator of the LFG list since 1999. In 1999–2000 I sponsored his sabbatical visit to Stanford University, where he came with his wife Brandel and three tall sons Elihu, Matityahu, and Gavriel. His daughter Pnina was not yet born.

At one time Yehuda remarked that he was the only linguist in Israel working on LFG. But he was not an isolate so much as a bridge between different linguistic schools. In the entire LFG community and the ILFGA, Yehuda Falk was one of the few who did comparative syntactic theorizing engaging the Chomskyan paradigm, thereby playing a very important role in theoretical cross-fertilization and communication, one which was invaluable for students particularly, as well as for researchers with broader perspectives in syntax. Some of his works which evidence this quality include “Resumptive Pronouns in LFG'” (Falk 2002), “Pivots and the Theory of Grammatical Functions'” (Falk 2000), and especially his textbook (Falk 2001). This book contains a number of original analyses and theoretical developments not published elsewhere and develops a coherent core of English syntax, including an extensive and persuasive discussion of infinitival constructions and relative clauses in LFG.

Yehuda Falk's research addressed central and classic problems in syntax — the limits of clause structure, the typology of agreement and case marking, extractions and related dependencies, and the nature of categories (the latter especially in Falk 2004, 2007) — within the LFG formal architecture making use of unification, structure-sharing, and parallel correspondence. His technical mastery of this architecture was superb, and his ability to express intuitive generalizations in an appropriate formal architecture, of the highest quality. There are many linguists who do not really understand the formalisms they use; they practice a kind of magical thinking about formalism, as Ron Kaplan once put it. Yehuda Falk understood.

At the LFG conference in Saratoga Springs in 2003 I heard Yehuda present “The English Auxiliary System Revisited'’. I thought it was a masterful synthesis of new evidence and theory, arguing for a mixed system and comparing his approach with rival contemporary proposals (including HPSG). I was also impressed by his manner of presentation; the paper was given with great clarity and charm, delightfully easy to follow even in the intricacies of argument. I recalled his interest in acting in musicals.

Who would guess that Yehuda was not only a great lover of Broadway musicals, but also a performer in them (in Hebrew)? Yehuda's star-sprinkled webpage displays his passion for Broadway and also reveals (less surprisingly) that he was a Trekkie. On those pages you will see his bibliography which I have referred to above, very selectively. And there too are a few biographical paragraphs about his parents and his motivations for migrating from New York, where he was born, to Israel.

Most of the LFG community met Yehuda when he was a man with a full beard and a strict religious practice. To me, Yehuda was always this boy from Brandeis, one of my first students, very clever, very curious. His sweetness and kindness were lifelong.

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2. LFG 2012 CONFERENCE, UDAYANA UNIVERSITY, BALI, INDONESIA

This year's conference took place 28 June-1 July 2012 at Udayana University, Bali, Indonesia. The full program and abstracts can be viewed on the conference website.
http://chl.anu.edu.au/linguistics/projects/ical-lfg/

Thursday, 28 June
09:30 - 10:15 Melanie Seiss: Lexical Semantics of Murrinh-Patha Complex Predicates: Qualia Structure and Beyond
10:15 - 11:00 Mark Dras, François Lareau, Benjamin Börschinger, Robert Dale, Yasaman Motazedi, Owen Rambow, Myfany Turpin and Morgan Ulinski: Complex Predicates in Arrernte
11:30 - 12:15 Adam Przepiórkowski and Agnieszka Patejuk: On case assignment and the coordination of unlikes: The limits of distributive features
12:15 - 13:00 Adam Przepiórkowski and Agnieszka Patejuk: The puzzle of case agreement between numeral phrases and predicative adjectives in Polish
14:00 - 15:00 Miriam Butt: Questions in Urdu/Hindi: Moving beyond Movement
15:30 - 16:15 Louisa Sadler and Maris Camilleri: On the Analysis of Extra-Argumental Datives in Maltese
16:15 - 17:00 György Rákosi: Non-core PPs are adjuncts
17:00 - 17:45 Stefano Quaglia: On Apparently Argument-Structure-Changing Spatial Particles in Italian

Friday, 29 June
09:00 - 09:45 Helge Lodrup: Is there a 'third object'? Searching a nominal counterpart to COMP
09:45 - 10:30 Maia Andréasson: Constraints on full NP object shift and pronominal object shift in Scandinavian
11:00 - 11:45 Doug Arnold and Louisa Sadler: Affected Experiencers and Mixed Semantics in LFG/Glue
11:45 - 12:30 Sebastian Sulger: Differential Subject Marking and the Stage/Individual Contrast in Hindi/Urdu
14:00 - 14:45 Ash Asudeh and Gianluca Giorgolo: Flexible Composition for Optional and Derived Arguments
14:45 - 15:30 Gianluca Giorgolo and Ash Asudeh: Missing Resources in a Resource-Sensitive Semantics
16:00 - 16:30 Yvette Graham: Deep Syntax in Statistical Machine Translation
16:30 - 17:00 Liselotte Snijders: Constraints on the discontinuity of prepositional phrases in Latin: an exception to Economy of Expression
17:00 - 17:30 Karen Park: The Selective Properties of Verbs in Reflexive Constructions

Saturday, 30 June
09:00 - 09:45            Kersti Börjars, Pauline Harries and Nigel Vincent: Grammaticalising by growing syntactic structure: the history of North Germanic nominal morphosyntax
09:45 - 10:30 Nadine Theiler and Gerlof Bouma: Two for the Price of One: An LFG treatment of sentence initial object ‘es’ in German
11:00 - 11:45 François Lareau, Mark Dras and Benjamin Börschingerr: The implementation of lexical functions in XLE
11:45 - 12:30 Agnieszka Patejuk and Adam Przepiórkowski: Agreement in an XLE grammar of Polish
14:00 - 14:45 Yvette Graham and Josef van Genabith: Exploring the Parameter Space in Statistical Machine Translation via F-structure Transfer
14:45 - 15:30 Dag Haug: From dependency grammar to LFG representations
16:00 - 17:30 POSTER SESSION
Paul Meurer: INESS-Search: A search system for LFG (and other) treebanks
Hyun Jong Hahm: Word Order and Agreement in American Sign Language (ASL)
One-Soon Her and Dun-Hong Deng: Lexical Mapping in Yami Verbs
Petr Homola and Matt Coler: Machine Translation Using Dependency Representation
Tina Bögel: Further investigations into the role of prosody in the parallel architecture
Owen Edwards: Non-Subject Participants in Tolaki
Cheikh Bamba Dione: An LFG Approach To Wolof Cleft Constructions
Anna Kibort: Participles, adjectives, and the role of argument structure
Ansu Berg, Rigardt Pretorius and Laurette Pretorius: Exploring the treatment of selected typological characteristics of Tswana in LFG and XLE

Sunday, 1 July
09:00 - 09:45 Dag Haug and Tatiana Nikitina: The many cases of non-finite subjects: The challenge of "dominant" participles
09:45 - 10:30            Tibor Laczko: On the (Un)Bearable Lightness of Being an LFG Style Copula in Hungarian
11:00 - 11:45 Alex Alsina and Boban Arsenijevic: Hierarchies and competing generalizations in Serbo-Croatian hybrid agreement
11:45 - 12:30 Agnieszka Patejuk and Adam Przepiórkowski: Lexico-semantic coordination in Polish
14:00 - 17:00 WORKSHOP ON NUMBER AND PLURALS
Mary Dalrymple: Number marking: An LFG overview
I Wayan Arka: Verbal number, argument number and plural events in Marori
Rachel Nordlinger: Number marking in the Daly River languages
Bill Palmer: Plural in Meso-Melanesian

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3. LFG BIBLIOGRAPHY

From Meladel Mistica, LFG Bibliographer:

The LFG bibliography has been updated - it has items from LFG2011. Also if people would like to check it for their publications and send me updates, that'd be super!!

http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/~mmistica/bibliography.html

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4. DRAFTS FOR COMMENTS

'Drafts for comments' offers bulletin readers the opportunity to submit information about drafts or projects on which they would like to receive comments from the community. This brings work in progress to the attention of the community and plays some of the role that previous incarnations of the archive played.

Please submit basic article/project information and a) a URL if the item is available online or else b) your contact email.

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5. RECENT LFG WORK

Send details of your recent work to < Louise.Mycock "at" gmail "dot" com >

5.1 PUBLICATIONS

Ahmed, Tafseer, Miriam Butt, Annette Hautli and Sebastian Sulger 2012. A Reference Dependency Bank for Analyzing Complex Predicates. Proceedings of the Eighth International conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), May, Istanbul.

Hautli, Annette, Sebastian Sulger and Miriam Butt 2012. Adding an Annotation Layer to the Hindi/Urdu Treebank. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT) 7.

Wedekind, Juergen & Ronald Kaplan (to appear). LFG generation by grammar specialization. Computational Linguistics, Vol 38 Number 4.

5.2 PHD/MASTERS

Pate, David R. 2012. Second Position Clitics and Subordinate 'tshe' clauses in Pashto. MA thesis, Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics, Dallas, TX.
http://www.gial.edu/images/theses/pate_david-thesis.pdf

5.3 CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS

LFG conference papers are available electronically at:
http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/LFG/

5.4 DOWNLOADABLE LFG PAPERS

A list of web-pages where people post downloadable LFG papers:
http://arts.anu.edu.au/linguistics/LFG/

Additional suggestions welcome.

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6. BOILERPLATE

The boilerplate (standard text) which previously appeared at the end of every bulletin can be accessed at:

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/external/LFG/

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