Default unification: online vs. offline

[Ash Asudeh]

Hello all

At least part of Luis' question was essentially whether there are
non-abbreviatory uses of defaults that are well-motivated theoretically.
Rob pointed out that the particular case of Cognitive Grammar prototypes
can be handled with online type construction.

I have a paper on Finnish licensing that uses persistent defaults (i.e.,
they are used in online syntax), but in a non-HPSG framework. The default
mechanism is defined using Lascarides and Copestake's criteria for
defaults, but it does not use YADU per se, as the feature values are
untyped. A brief abstract follows below.

If anyone's interested, the paper can be found at (.ps and .pdf
available):

www.stanford.edu/~asudeh/finnishLicensing.{ps,pdf}

I'll be presenting it at the LSA, so comments are welcome. Please bear in
mind that this wasn't written with an HPSG-specific audience in mind, and
Ivan has made it clear to me that I need to work on some aspects of the
exposition to best explain how things work to a constraint-based grammar
audience.

Best,
Ash



A Licensing Theory for Finnish

A licensing theory specifies a tripartite relation between thematic roles,
grammatical functions, and grammatical case. I present a licensing theory
for Finnish based on recent Optimality Theory (OT) work by Kiparsky
(2001). However, the account presented here uses default unification
(Lascarides and Copestake 1999), rather than OT. I argue that this yields
a more restrictive licensing theory that nevertheless has several of OT's
hallmarks, including violable constraints, typological prediction, and
emergence of the unmarked. Thus, this work makes two principal
contributions: 1) it provides a licensing theory for Finnish with
considerable empirical coverage, predicting the distribution of objects
with various grammatical cases, as well as the distribution of VP-external
([Spec, IP]) and VP-internal subjects, and adnominal genitives; 2) it
showcases default unification as an alternative to Optimality Theory.