28.4065, Diss: Computational Linguistics, Morphology, Typology: Matías Guzmán Naranjo: ''Analogy in formal grammar''

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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4065. Wed Oct 04 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.4065, Diss: Computational Linguistics, Morphology, Typology: Matías Guzmán Naranjo: ''Analogy in formal grammar''

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Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2017 11:40:21
From: Matías Guzmán Naranjo [mortem.dei at gmail.com]
Subject: Analogy in formal grammar

 
Institution: Universität Leipzig 
Program: Institut für Linguistik 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2017 

Author: Matías Guzmán Naranjo

Dissertation Title: Analogy in formal grammar 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Morphology
                     Typology


Dissertation Director(s):
Doris Schönefeld
Olivier Bonami

Dissertation Abstract:

The organization of the lexicon, and especially the relations between groups
of lexemes is a strongly debated topic in linguistics. Some authors have
insisted on the lack of any structure of the lexicon. In this vein, Di Sciullo
and Williams (1987, p. 3) claim that “[t]he lexicon is like a prison – it
contains only the lawless, and the only thing that its inmates have in
commonis lawlessness”. In the alternative view, the lexicon is assumed to have
a rich structure that captures all regularities and partial regularities that
exist between lexical entries.Two very different schools of linguistics have
insisted on the organization of the lexicon.
On the one hand, for theories like HPSG (Pollard and Sag, 1994), but also some
versions of construction grammar (Fillmore and Kay, 1995), the lexicon is
assumed to have a very rich structure which captures common grammatical
properties between its members. In this approach, a type hierarchy organizes
the lexicon according to common properties between items. For example, Koenig
(1999, p. 4, among others), working from an HPSG perspective, claims that the
lexicon “provides a unified model for partial regularties, medium-size
generalizations, and truly productive processes”.

On the other hand, from the perspective of usage-based linguistics, several
authors have drawn attention to the fact that lexemes which share
morphological or syntactic properties, tend to be organized in clusters of
surface (phonological or semantic) similarity (Bybee and Slobin, 1982;
Skousen, 1989; Eddington, 1996). This approach, often called analogical, has
de-veloped highly accurate computational and non-computational models that can
predict the classes to which lexemes belong. Like the organization of lexemes
in type hierarchies, analogical relations between items help speakers to make
sense of intricate systems, and reduce apparent complexity (Köpcke and Zubin,
1984).

Despite this core commonality, and despite the fact that most linguists seem
to agree that analogy plays an important role in language, there has been
remarkably little work on bringing together these two approaches. Formal
grammar traditions have been very successful in capturing grammatical
behaviour, but, in the process, have downplayed the role analogy plays in
linguistics (Anderson, 2015). In this work, I aim to change this state of
affairs. First, by providing an explicit formalization of how analogy
interacts with grammar, and second, by showing that analogical effects and
relations closely mirror the structures in the lexicon. I
will show that both formal grammar approaches, and usage-based analogical
models, capture mutually compatible relations in the lexicon.




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