32.1302, Review: Syntax: Schulte im Walde, Smolka (2020)

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Subject: 32.1302, Review: Syntax: Schulte im Walde, Smolka (2020)

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Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2021 18:29:37
From: Doug Merchant [dochme at live.com]
Subject: The role of constituents in multiword expressions

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-951.html

EDITOR: Sabine  Schulte im Walde
EDITOR: Eva  Smolka
TITLE: The role of constituents in multiword expressions
SUBTITLE: An interdisciplinary, cross-lingual perspective
SERIES TITLE: Phraseology and Multiword Expressions
PUBLISHER: Language Science Press
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Doug Merchant, University of Georgia

SUMMARY

This is the fourth volume in the Phraseology and Multiword Expressions series
from Berlin’s Language Science Press, and includes seven research articles
spanning psycholinguistic, corpus, and computational investigations into a
range of issues surrounding the production, comprehension, representation, and
interpretation of complex expressions. The umbrella term used here is
“multiword expressions” (MWEs), a term that the editors define extensionally
to include particle verbs, noun-noun compounds, and phrasal idioms; the
“constituents” of the title are not necessarily syntactic constituents, but
rather refer to the various parts of a complex expression.

The initial chapter, by Sylvia Springorum and Sabine Schulte im Walde,
considers German particle verbs (PVs, e.g., “anhäufen,” ‘to pile up’). Such
verbs are sometimes considered to be noncompositional, with fully
idiosyncratic semantics, and even if the particle does contribute anything to
the semantics of the verb, the nature of the contribution clearly varies, such
that “an” (e.g.) bears a cumulative meaning in one verb (“anhäufen”), a
partitive meaning in another (“anbeiβen,” ‘to take a bite’), and a topological
meaning in another (“anbinden,” ‘to tie to’). The question the authors address
here is whether any conceptual consistency can be identified across these
combinations. 

Assuming that particles, like prepositions, function in part to spatially
ground concepts in what Lakoff (1987) has referred to as “image schemas,” the
authors report here on a novel experiment in which participants matched German
PVs with directional pictographs referred to as “concept images” consisting of
boxes with directional arrows. For example, for the particle “an,” the authors
hypothesized that participants would choose images with horizontal arrows
pointing to the left and/or right, proposing that the “direction of human
sight – with a neutral head position which is horizontal by default –
determines this conceptual direction” (p. 11). The results are illustrated
descriptively with heat maps based on proportions of responses (no inferential
statistics were apparently attempted), and indeed, the authors found for “an-”
verbs that more participants chose horizontal arrows pointing to the right
than any other pictograph. The authors therefore conclude that directional
concepts play a role in semantic composition in particle verbs.

The next article in this volume, by Sandro Pezzelle and Marco Marelli, looks
at the classification of compounds, and whether classifications predicted by
purely semantic variables in a computational model concord with
theoretically-predicted classifications. The framework they use for the
latter, taken from Bisetto and Scalise (2005), includes Subordinate compounds
such as “doghouse,” which can be rephrased syntactically as “house of the
dog”; Attributive compounds such as “swordfish,” where the first constituent
acts similarly to an attributive adjective; and finally Coordinate compounds
such as “comedy-drama,” whose constituents the authors claim are linked by “an
underlying conjunction” (p. 34). This tripartite linguistic framework, the
authors note, is similar to that proposed in the psychological literature on
conceptual combination. Considering the novel compound “zebra-horse,” for
example, one might read a Relation-linking relationship (e.g., a horse which
interacts with zebras in some manner), a Property-mapping relationship (e.g.,
as a horse with some property of zebras’, such as being striped), or a
Hybrid/Conjunctive relationship (e.g., an animal which is in its essence both
horse and zebra). 

This conceptual combination framework is semantic in nature, but some
commonalities are apparent with the “syntactic” categories, and so Pezzelle
and Marelli set out to test whether semantic variables can predict these
classifications, using a computational distributional semantic model (cDSM) in
which lexical meanings are encoded geometrically as vectors based on the
contexts in which words appear in a corpus. The results (in part) indicated
that Coordinate compounds (e.g. “comedy-drama”) are predicted over Subordinate
and Attributive compounds by the semantic similarity of the head and its
modifier, and that Subordinate compounds (e.g. “doghouse”) are predicted over
Attributive by the similarity between the compound and its constituents. The
authors conclude that the qualitative, discrete linguistic classifications and
continuous, quantitative variation in the meaning of the constituents of a
compound are “two sides of the same coin.”

The third article, by Gianina Iordǎchioaia, Lonneke van der Plas, and
Glorianna Jagfeld, focuses more narrowly on deverbal compounds (DCs) such as
“budget assessment.” Following Grimshaw (1990), the authors argue that
deverbal nouns such as “assessment” are ambiguous between an argument
structure nominal (ASN) and a result nominal (RN) interpretation. Deverbal
nouns with an ASN reading have available what the authors refer to here as
“verbal event structure”; this structure “enforces and constrains argument
realization in ASNs. . . and its absence in RNs” (p. 63). The contrast can be
seen in their (4a-c), reproduced in part here:

(1) a. The examination / exam was on the table.
      b. The  examination / *exam  of the patients took a long time.
      c. *The examination of the patients was on the table.

In (1a), we have synonymy between the RN “exam” and the RN reading of
“examination,” a synonymy that disappears when the object argument “of the
patients” is added in (1b), which results in only the eventive ASN reading
being available. In (1c), we see ungrammaticality due to an ASN reading of
“examination” enforced by the realization of the argument in a context where
only a concrete RN would normally be possible (“on the table”). 

Compounds based on deverbal nouns (DCs) may in theory be based on either the
ASN or the RN reading of the noun. When it is the former, the authors argue,
then the non-head is interpreted as the object of the verb. For example, in
“budget assessment,” the interpretation of “budget” as the object of “assess”
suggests that “assessment” is unambiguously an ASN, as RNs do not have
argument structure. For a DC such as “government assessment,” however, there
is not only an ASN-object reading (where the government is being assessed) but
also an RN-subject reading (where the government is doing the assessing).
Iordǎchioaia et al. claim that the former is the default reading, and that in
the second reading, the non-head “behaves just like an adjunct/modifier, since
it does not play any role in the compositional makeup of the DC” (p. 65). The
authors hypothesize that DCs whose heads are ASNs will realize only objects as
non-heads; unlike RNs, they are compositionally constructed. RNs, on the other
hand, are lexicalized, and their apparent deverbal derivational morphology is
irrelevant; they are in this respect similar to non-derived nouns. 

To test this hypothesis, the authors examined DCs for a set of morphosyntactic
and semantic properties Grimshaw had identified as specific to ASNs. One of
these they term “process-vs-result” (P-R), or whether the head of a DC refers
to an ongoing process or its result; this and other features were obtained
from native-speaker annotations. Iordǎchioaia et al. then used a
machine-learning technique in which they trained a logistic regression
classifier to model whether these features predict the relationship between
the head and the non-head, in particular whether the non-head was an object or
non-object. As it turned out, the greatest predictor was not a morphosyntactic
property extracted from the corpus, but a semantic feature introspected by the
annotators: “process-vs-result.” The authors conclude that DCs are
compositional only to the extent that their heads evince ASN properties; such
compounds are also more transparent than those whose heads evince RN
properties.

In the fourth article here, Gary Libben considers novel compounds, reporting
on the results of a progressive demasking / typing experiment which
investigates whether all possible lexical substrings are activated in
orthographically ambiguous novel compounds such as “clampeel” (parsable as
either CLAMP-EEL or CLAM-PEEL). Libben argues that such compounds cannot be
said to “have” any morphological structure when first encountered; rather,
structure is imposed by the parser. Libben proposes as a heuristic Fuzzy
Forward Lexical Activation (FFLA), wherein initial letters are scanned
left-to-right until a known substring is recognized (e.g., CLAM). At this
point, a final substring is posited beginning with the next letter (PEEL); if
it is also recognized, it’s interpreted, and the procedure resets. On the
second parse, the initial letters are again scanned until another known
substring is recognized (CLAMP); a final substring is then posited (EEL), and
the procedure ends. This heuristic thus generates two disparate
representations for the same string (CLAM-PEEL and CLAMP-EEL); in allusion
perhaps to the physicists’ phenomenon of quantum superposition, Libben
describes this as a “lexical superstate.”  

Libben then reports on the results of an experiment in which participants
retyped both ambiguous (CLAMPEEL) and nonambiguous (ANKLECOB) compounds
presented on a screen, with the typing latencies of each letter recorded. A
significant spike in latencies between the two possible letter strings for
unambiguous compounds (ANKLE - COB) was apparent, with only moderately longer
latencies at the two possible boundaries in ambiguous compounds (CLAM – PEEL;
CLAMP - EEL). Libben takes this as evidence for lexical superstates and for
FFLA, noting however that the latter may be an adaptation specific to English,
as other languages (e.g. German) have orthographic systems which represent
compounds differently. 

This observation provides an excellent segue into the fifth article, a
qualitative corpus study by Inga Hennecke on variability in the preposition in
N Prep N constructions in Romance. For example, Spanish “juego de niños”
(‘children’s game’) may also be realized as “juego para niños,” apparently
without any semantic distinction. A lack of internal variation is widely seen
as a diagnostic for compoundhood (and for idiomaticity), and the debate over
the significance of the prepositional variation in these compounds therefore
stands as a potential proxy for the debate over the boundary between syntax
and morphology. Are such phrases the result of productive syntactic processes?
Or should they rather be classed as fully lexicalized compounds which admit
minor (idiolectal?) variation.

Hennecke looks for a middle path here, arguing that “it is neither necessary
nor possible to draw a clear distinction between syntactic constructions and
lexical constructions” (p. 135). Working within the framework of construction
grammar (Goldberg, 1995), and in particular Booij’s (2015) construction
morphology, Hennecke argues that the prepositions in N Prep N constructions
are not semantically opaque linking elements but rather have “a specific
semantic value determined by the semantic functions of the nominal
constituents” (p. 142). She supports this argument through a crosslinguistic
analysis of the semantics of the nominal constituents in a range of such
constructions in French, Spanish and Portuguese. In considering (e.g.) the
contrast between “de” and French “pour” / Spanish and Portuguese “para,”
Hennecke concludes that in French, “pour” is only possible where the second
noun is in some sense a user or beneficiary, or where it specifies the purpose
of the first noun: “collier de chien,” “collier pour chien” (‘collar of a
dog’, ‘collar for a dog’; Hennecke therefore posits an abstract semantic
template which registers this relationship and governs this construction. A
similar situation is apparent for Spanish “de”/”para”; however, in Portuguese,
variation between “de” and ”para” is possible for a larger number of semantic
relations between the two nouns, such that (e.g.) the first noun may serve as
an instrument for the second noun: “creme de/para mãos” (lit. ‘cream of/for
hands’, id. ‘hand cream’).

The penultimate piece in this volume, by Christina L. Gagné, Thomas L.
Spalding, J. Claire Burry, and Jessica Tellis Adams, reports on an experiment
on production choices between bare nouns (“dog”), noun phrases with prenominal
modifiers (“blue dog”), which the authors refer to as “modifier-noun phrases,”
and noun phrases with post-nominal information (“a dog that was blue”), or
“full phrases.” The question here is twofold: does the distinctiveness of
modifying information about an entity in a narrative influence whether that
information is reproduced when a speaker subsequently refers to that entity?
And does the syntactic form in which a nominal is modified in a narrative
influence the syntactic form in which a speaker conveys that information? The
first question concerns the manner in which a speaker marks conceptual
distinctions among member of a category; for instance, a blue dog is more
conceptually distinct from the larger category of dogs than is a brown dog.
The second question, of course, concerns the phenomenon of syntactic priming,
i.e., whether exposure to given syntactic structures in some input impacts the
structure chosen as output.

The experiment itself is concisely constructed, with four narrative
conditions: nondistinctive / modifier-noun phrases (“brown dog”),
non-distinctive / full phrases (“dog that was brown”), distinctive /
modifier-noun phrases (“blue dog”), and distinctive / full phrases (“dog that
was blue”). After reading narratives which included target information,
participants were asked to answer questions about the story (by typing) which
necessitated reference to the target phrase. Both the distinctiveness of the
information and the syntactic form were significant in the analysis; perhaps
to no one’s surprise, participants were more likely to include distinctive
information, and more likely to answer with bare nouns for nondistinctive
information. Interestingly, they were also significantly more likely to
include modifiers when the information was presented as a modifier-noun phrase
than when it was presented post-nominally. Full phrases in the input were more
likely to induce full phrases in the output; however, modifier-noun phrases
were still preferentially produced even in this condition. Gagné et al.
conclude that conceptual distinctiveness influences the choice to include
modifying information, and that a general preference exists for modifier-noun
phrases over full phrases when it comes to including that information.

Finally, a study by Eva Smolka and Carsten Eulitz considers the phrasal idiom
(e.g., “reach for the stars”), the paradigm of a complex expression. Although
the subtitle of the article references “idiom processing,” Smolka and Eulitz
used an offline task to measure speakers’ judgements on meaning relatedness
between modified German idioms like “nach den Sternen greifen” (lit. ‘reach
for the stars’, idiomatically same as English) and paraphrases of the idioms’
meanings. Their intention was to examine whether a figurative reading is still
available when one of the idiom’s parts has been modified (“reach for the
planets”), and thus whether idioms are fully “semantically fixed.” (What is
meant by “semantically fixed” is not explicitly defined; one wonders whether
“phonologically-” or “orthographically-fixed” might not be more appropriate,
as the semantics of the idioms were not modified, but merely the form.)

Three experiments were conducted: one in which the nouns varied, one in which
the verbs varied, and one in which the preposition varied. In the first
experiment, the authors replaced the noun with either a semantically related
noun (“Planeten,” ‘planets’) or an unrelated noun (“Bonbons,” ‘sweets’). In
the second, the verb was replaced with either an associated verb (“gelangt,”
‘grasped’) or an unrelated verb (“gefragt,” ‘asked’). The third experiment, in
which the prepositional was varied, looked slightly different, in that either
a different preposition appeared (“zu,” ‘to’) or a prepositional phrase with
the same preposition but a different nominal appeared (“nach den Bonbons,”
‘for the sweets’). Trials consisted of pairing a paraphrase of the meaning of
the idiom with a sentence containing either the unaltered or the altered
idiom; participants rated on a seven-point scale the similarity in meaning of
the two sentences. 

As one might expect, the sentences with a slightly altered constituent were
rated as closer in meaning to the paraphrases than were the sentences with an
unrelated constituent; this effect was larger in the first experiment, where
the verb was switched out, than in the conditions where the noun or
preposition was replaced. Smolka and Eulitz conclude that the figurative
meanings of idioms are “activated” even when part of the idiom has been
supplanted, and that modified constituents “may contribute to the generation
of the figurative meaning of the idiom” (p. 197). They take this as evidence
for views like that of Hamblin & Gibbs Jr. (1999), in which the semantics of a
verb in its literal sense may (synchronically) constrain the semantics of the
idiom in which the same form appears (this is also argued for in Marantz, 1997
and McGinnis, 2002; the opposite position is articulated in Merchant, 2019).
The authors here further argue that their results tell against “any type of
model on idiom comprehension or production that assumes some kind of fixed
lexical entry of the idiomatic constituents that generate the figurative
meaning” (p. 199), such as e.g. the “superlemma” theory of Sprenger et al.,
2006. As the experiments reported here did not investigate online
comprehension but rather offline meaning comparisons, this claim especially
will probably strike most psycholinguists as a bit too far-reaching.  

EVALUATION

This volume is interdisciplinary by design, and so cannot be cohesive in a
strong sense. However, the articles included all address theoretical questions
with some sort of empirical study, whether corpus-based, experimental, or
computational, and thus together give a good sense of the range of approaches
researchers are bringing to bear on understanding multiword expressions. 

More importantly, however, is the cohesion in subject matter, and that is the
chief contribution of this volume as a whole. Rarely are particle verbs and
phrasal idioms brought under the same roof, despite having some important
properties in common, and anyone who reads this book from cover to cover will
doubtlessly come away with some important insights. Of course, research
articles are not normally consumed in this manner, so I will briefly evaluate
the articles included here in turn.

The first article, by Springorum and Schulte im Walde, consisted of an
experimental study on German particle verbs; the authors sought to determine
whether speakers would reliably match directional pictographs to particles
regardless of the verb with which they combine. The chief flaw of this study
is that despite reams of quantitative data, no inferential statistics were
apparently attempted. The lack of so much as an ANOVA is puzzling (especially
given that other articles in this volume use state-of-the-art statistical
techniques); any experimentalist worth their salt will therefore likely look
on the authors’ conclusions skeptically. How are we to know that the apparent
agreement of participants on the pictographs is not due to random chance? 

On a more minor note, there are a few occasions where the authors cite
evidence only indirectly which might help their case if cited directly:
“[A]ccording to Gibbs Jr. & Colston (1995) there is good evidence that both
spatial and visual representations exist for mental imagery” (pp. 5-6).
Especially since the general theoretical framework referenced here (holding
that conceptual structures exist independent of language) is somewhat
controversial among mainstream linguists (see, e.g., Keysar & Bly, 1999), such
evidence should probably have been described in some detail in this section.

The second article here, by Pezzelle and Marelli, looked at whether
“syntax-based” classifications of compounds as Subordinate, Attributive, or
Coordinate can be identified via continuous semantic properties in a
computational distributed semantics model. The study is well-done, and the
authors wise to note that “discrete and continuous approaches are two faces of
the same coin,” giving neither primacy. A small note would be the possibly
misleading use of the terms “syntax-based” and “syntactic” to describe the
categories; there’s very little of interest to the average syntactician here,
nor are the categories justified in terms of syntactic data (e.g., example
sentences).
   
The third article, by Iordǎchioaia, van der Plas, and Jagfeld, looks at
deverbal compounds with ASN readings and whether a set of semantic and
morphosyntactic properties theoretically proposed to be specific to ASNs can
predict the relationship between the head of a compound and its non-head
modifier. The theoretical issues involved go back to Chomsky’s (1970) “Remarks
on nominalization,” and arguments for and against Chomsky’s “lexicalist”
position continue to this day (e.g., Bruening, 2018). The authors here profess
to not be taking sides in this debate, but their conclusion that ASNs are
indeed compositional nevertheless seems to argue against the lexicalist
position, so some greater discussion of the theoretical issues would have been
useful. It might also be mentioned that a number of their grammaticality
judgements are likely not universal, with counterexamples readily available.
For example, the authors note that “The examination of the patients was on the
table” (their (4c)) is unacceptable, but “The assessment of the patients was
on the table” is quite felicitous to this reviewer’s ears. (I also find no
contrast whatsoever between (9a) and (9b).) 

Libben’s article on novel compounds and his Fuzzy Forward Lexical Activation
model will be of great use to anyone who works on orthographic processing,
although whether an analogical process in the domain of speech processing
might be found is uncertain. It will also be of interest to anyone who works
on morphology generally, and likely anyone concerned with how text is
processed in advertising. It’s also a clear and concise read, with a
well-designed and novel methodology that any experimentalist will appreciate.

Inga Hennecke’s qualitative corpus study of left-headed N Prep N compounds in
Romance is a useful addition to the literature, and will provide some
much-needed perspective for anyone who usually considers only right-headed
Germanic nominal compounds; indeed, anyone interested in the boundary between
syntax and morphology would do well to consider such facts. Those who are
already aficionados of construction grammar will likely be more convinced of
the analysis than those who are not as familiar with such approaches; the
section which introduces construction morphology is fairly brief and is
probably not easily apprehensible for novices. 

The production choice experiment reported on in in Gagné et al. is
well-designed and perspicuously laid out, but feels a bit out of place in this
volume in that the multiword expressions considered here are not complex fixed
expressions or in any manner noncompositional (this is technically true of
Libben’s novel compounds, too, but many fixed expressions begin their lives as
novel compounds, so his study seems relevant). It is an important experiment,
however, in a basic-science sort of way; the fact that only distinctive
information is likely to be conveyed in a summary of that information might
seem obvious to some, but it is important to demonstrate the obvious
experimentally so that one might then felicitously probe the not-so-obvious.

Finally, the experimental study by Smolka and Eulitz (the only one in the
volume that is concerned primarily with figurative language) is another
well-designed study which demonstrates the obvious, viz., that the semantics
of an idiom are more likely to be considered when one of its constituents is
replaced by a word whose meaning is similar to the word it replaces than when
the word is replaced by an unrelated word, so that “reach for the planets” is
judged as more similar in meaning to ‘aspire to unobtainable goals’ than is
“reach for the sweets.” However, as I note above, the conclusions reached by
the authors do not seem to be warranted on the basis of this study. Collecting
offline judgements of meaning similarity, in which participants have an
unbounded amount of time to compare sentences (the experiments here were
conducted by email), tells us next to nothing about idiom processing or
semantic activation. 

The chief conclusion that can be drawn from the data reported here, it seems
to me, is merely that the participants were familiar enough with the idioms
involved to be able interpret a phrase like “reach for the planets” as ‘aspire
to something unobtainable’. Note that “reach for the planets” does not have a
plausible literal reading, and so the only available interpretation is a
metaphorical one, which “alludes to an idiom without actually containing one,”
as Svenonius (2005:228) puts it. In short, it is a metalinguistic reference to
an idiom, made possible by introspection. What would be interesting would be
an online study of this phenomenon, wherein a speaker utters a modified
version of an idiom (as might happen by accident) and a listener is forced to
recover the meaning of the original idiom under ecologically valid conditions.
Such a study might justify the sorts of conclusions the authors reach here.

REFERENCES

Bisetto, A., & Scalise, S. 2005. The classification of compounds. Lingue e
linguaggio 4(2). 319-32.

Booij, G. 2015. Word-formation in construction grammar. In O.P. Müller, I.
Ohnheiser, S. Olsen & F. 
Rainer (eds.), Crossdisciplinary issues in compounding (Current issues in
linguistic theory 311), 93-109. Amsterdam, John Benjamins.

Bruening, B. 2018. The lexicalist hypothesis: Both wrong and superfluous.
Language 94(1). 1-42. 

Chomsky, N. 1967 [1970]. Remarks on nominalization. In Roderick A. Jacobs &
Peter S. Rosenbaum (eds.), Readings in English transformational grammar.
Waltham, MA: Ginn. 

Goldberg, A.E. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to
argument structure. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.

Grimshaw, J. 1990. Argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hamblin, J.L. & Gibbs Jr., R.W. 1999. Why you can’t kick the bucket as you
slowly die: Verbs in idiom comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
28(1). 25-39.

Keysar, Boaz & Bly, Bridget M. 1999. Swimming against the current: Do idioms
reflect conceptual structure? Journal of Pragmatics 31. 1559-78.

Lakoff, G. 1987. Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal
about the mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Marantz, A. 1997. No escape from syntax: Don’t try morphological analysis in
the privacy of your own lexicon. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in
Linguistics 4(2):201-25.

McGinnis, M. 2002. On the systematic aspect of idioms. Linguistic Inquiry
33(4). 665‐72.

Merchant, D.C. 2019. Idioms at the interface(s): Towards a
psycholinguistically grounded model of sentence generation. Athens, GA:
University of Georgia dissertation.

Sprenger, S.A., W.J.M. Levelt & G. Kempen. 2006. Lexical access during the
production of idiomatic phrases. Journal of Memory and Language. 54(2).
161-84.

Svenonius, P. 2005. Extending the Extension Condition to discontinuous idioms.
In Pierre Pica, Johan Rooryck & Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (eds.), Linguistic
Variation Yearbook 5. 227-63.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Doug Merchant holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Georgia (UGA)
and a BA in same from the University of Arizona. His dissertation examined
what the syntactic and semantic properties of phrasal idioms reveal about the
lexical interface(s). He has published also on the question of the
directionality of derivations, with a focus on theory-external arguments for
top-down structure building, and is currently writing up the results of an
experimental study on empty category processing in Brazilian Portuguese. He
was most recently a visiting researcher at UGA, and has also taught syntax at
San Diego State University.





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