[Corpora-List] Subcat Questions

Detmar Meurers dm at ling.ohio-state.edu
Thu Jun 19 22:31:19 UTC 2003


Hi,

On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 10:35:05AM -0400, Christopher Bader wrote:
> I would go farther than Mike and say that subcategorization frames
> are pretty much gone from contemporary syntactic analysis.

That's a rather surprising statement. The contemporary syntactic
frameworks with an interest in empirical coverage (cf. LFG, HPSG,
CCG, TAG, FDG) crucially rely on subcategorization information. A
subcategorization frame encodes the syntactic potential/requirements
of a lexical item and as such is the key to the syntactic analysis.
Some of the subcategorization frames can be inferred from linking
regularities based on the lexical semantics, while others have to be
lexically stipulated.

In computational linguistics, learning subcategorization frames from
corpora also is an active research field, underlining their
empirical relevance.

> NFS server caesar not responding still trying
> have been been replaced by head-complement relations, in many cases
> involving functional heads, like "little v", which plays a role in
> the "double object" construction.
> For a good explanation, and
> indeed an excellent introduction to contempory syntax, see Andrew
> Radford's Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English.

Here are two other relevant pointers:

Robert D. Borsley
Syntactic Theory: A Unified Approach
2nd Edition. OUP/Edward Arnold. 1999.

Ivan A. Sag, Thomas Wasow, and Emily M. Bender
Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction
2nd Edition. CSLI Publications. 2003.

Best regards,
Detmar

--
Detmar Meurers                              Fax: Int + 614 292-8833
The Ohio State University                   Tel: Int + 614 292-0461
Department of Linguistics                   E-Mail: dm at ling.osu.edu
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"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly
one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to
suit facts." Sherlock Holmes in "A Scandal in Bohemia" (A. C. Doyle)



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