[HPSG-L] Selection of phonology in nonlocal dependencies and raising

Tue Mar 1 10:10:51 UTC 2016

A phenomenon which is less bounded than "a/an" is consonant dissimilation
(see e.g. Bye, 2011): e.g. the Georgian suffix "-uri" becomes "-uli" if the
stem has an "r" somewhere (but not also an "l" after the "r").

Perhaps there's a language where this can happen over longer expressions?

2016-02-29 20:29 GMT+00:00 Berthold Crysmann <berthold.crysmann at gmail.com>:

> Hi Dan and Stefan,
>
> just a brief remark on the phonological examples.
>
> On 29/02/2016 19:28, Dan Flickinger wrote:
>
>> Hi Stefan -
>>
>> I have been discussing with Paul Kay the issues you raised before the new
>> year about SBCG, regarding some consequences of dropping the SYNSEM feature
>> and adding the MOTHER feature.  I hope you can roll back the time machine
>> to let me pick up this thread.
>>
>> First, on the phonology front, I think the prediction you note is a good
>> one, that the PHON feature can be referred to in syntax.  Even in English,
>> we see at least two phenomena that benefit from this visibility, one
>> involving the choice of determiner "a" vs. "an", and the other the voicing
>> of possessive "s" when analyzed as a phrasal clitic.  Without the PHON
>> feature, it is hard to see how to ensure that "an" appears when the next
>> word in the noun phrase has a vocalic onset, and "a" when the onset is
>> consonantal.
>>
> Markus Walther proposed contextualised alternants in One Level Phonology.
> I.e. every segment may impose constraints on its immediate neighbours. That
> solves pretty much all the issues raised in the One Level Phonology debate
> raised against Bird & Klein back in 1994 (CL special issue). I do not see
> why this cannot be used for the a/an case at hand. Do get Markus's thesis
> (it's in German, but that should not be an obstacle for you since you've
> been improving your command of that language reading and re-reading my
> admittedly cheap copy of "Der Schatz im Silbersee";-).
>
> As for -s, there's a bigger discussion including the arguments raised by
> Zwicky, Miller, Halpern etc., so this touches on the phrasal affix vs, edge
> inflection business. Again, I have reservations.
>
> Cheers,
>
> B
>
>   With PHON available, the word "an" can constrain its SPEC value
>> (constraints on the head of the head-specifier construction) to have a PHON
>> which has a vocalic onset, and similarly for "a".  A second such phenomenon
>> is the voicing of the "'s" marking the possessive of singular NPs: even
>> though this contrast is not reflected in the orthography, this morpheme has
>> to be voiced if the coda (the final phoneme) of the preceding NP is voiced,
>> and voiceless otherwise.  This argument is relevant as long as the
>> possessive morpheme is treated as a phrasal clitic, an analysis motivated
>> well in Anderson (2013): http://cowgill.ling.yale.edu/sra/elsj.pdf.
>> Here again, as long as the PHON feature is present in what a selector can
>> constrain, the voiced and unvoiced variant entries of the possessive clitic
>> can constrain their SPR value (treating the clitic as the head) to have the
>> appropriate voiced/unvoiced coda.
>>
>> I see that these two examples do not satisfy your wish for a phenomenon
>> that imposes a phonologoical constraint even through an unbounded
>> dependency, but even the surface-level effects of these two examples
>> involve syntactic elements that are not immediate lexical sisters, so the
>> dependencies are non-local in these syntactic structures.
>>
>> Regarding the addition of the MOTHER feature in SBCG, I see it as one
>> reasonable approach to expressing the highly desirable property of locality
>> in allowable syntactic constraints.  I agree with you that for this feature
>> to achieve its intended purpose of hiding properties of daughters of a
>> phrase from outside selection that are not identified with any features in
>> MOTHER, one has to ensure that only the value of this MOTHER feature
>> structure can be referenced, but that is how SBCG is set up: the selector
>> features have as values lists of signs, and signs don't have access to
>> daughters.   As you know, this locality requirement is expressed
>> differently in grammars such as the English Resource Gramamr, which
>> introduces an ARGS (`daughters') feature as a top-level attribute of
>> `sign', and follows Pollard and Sag 94 in having the values of the selector
>> features be lists of synsem objects (a stronger constraint than in SBCG),
>> thus preventing access to that ARGS feature for selection.  I find this
>> ARGS mechanism for constructions to be at least as convenient as the SBCG
>> architecture with its MOTHER feature, but I don't see any important
>> difference in intent, namely to make explicit the strong hypothesis that
>> dependencies imposed by words and phrases are strictly local.
>>
>> Regarding the treatment of phonology-driven selection phenomena in this
>> more classical HPSG architecture used in the ERG, I have moved the PHON
>> feature into SYNSEM, but a more conservative approach might aim to
>> identify particular elements of a sign's phonology (perhaps just `onset'
>> and `coda') that are made reentrant with features within SYNSEM.  This more
>> conservative exposure of limited properties of phonology would be harder to
>> do in SBCG where the full PHON value is necessarily visible for selection,
>> so it will be interesting to know if others have found other phenomena that
>> motivate selector access to more complex phonological properties.
>>
>>   Dan
>>
>>
>> ________________________________________
>> From: HPSG-L <hpsg-l-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of
>> Stefan Müller <stefan.mueller at fu-berlin.de>
>> Sent: Friday, December 11, 2015 2:35 AM
>> To: hpsg-l at listserv.linguistlist.org
>> Subject: [HPSG-L] Selection of phonology in nonlocal dependencies and
>> raising
>>
>> Hi everybody,
>>
>> I recently got some comments on the section on SBCG in my GT textbook. I
>> rethought everything and have some questions that I cannot answer but
>> maybe somebody on the list knows the answer.
>>
>> One motivation for the change in feature geometry with locality of
>> selection. This braught MOTHER. Interestingly SYNSEM is gone now and
>> PHON is grouped with SYN and SEM. LOCAL is gone too. Rather than
>> selecting for synsem objects and sharing local objects in nonlocal
>> dependencies, complete signs are selected for and shared in nonlocal
>> dependencies.
>>
>> MOTHER was introduced to exclude the selection for arguments of
>> arguments of arguments. As with computational complexity, I think that
>> this should not be hardwired in the grammar formalism, the fact that we
>> do not select arguments of arguments is just a fact about what the
>> theories do. We do not have to state explicitely everything that is
>> impossible.
>>
>> But let's assume we think that MOTHER should be there because of
>> locality issues. Wouldn't it be a problem then that a head that is far
>> away can select the phonology of one of its arguments?
>>
>> In the approach to raising in SBCG the subject of the downstairs head is
>> shared with the matrix subject. So "eat" can see the phonology of "Kim":
>>
>> Kim can eat apples.
>>
>> Of course we can have long chains of raising verbs. Question: Are there
>> languages that show phonological effects accross several words? And if
>> so, does it help to have a head that selects for the phonology of a
>> phrase far away or should these phonological effects be treated on the
>> phrasal level?
>>
>> The second issue is nonlocal dependencies:
>>
>> Bagels, I think that Sandy likes.
>>
>> "likes" can see the phonology of "bagels", as can "that" as can "think".
>> In principle there could be languages that require that the filler has
>> three vowels in it or anything like this.
>>
>> Are there languages that have phenomena in which the phonology of the
>> filler affects elements at the extraction path?
>>
>>
>> The stuff is written down more carefully here (Section 10.6.2) and will
>> be updated depending on the outcome of this discussion.
>>
>> http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/~stefan/Pub/grammatical-theory.html
>>
>>
>> Thank you very much for your feedback and possibly for references to
>> work that describes relevant phenomena.
>>
>> Best wishes
>>
>>          Stefan
>>
>> --
>> PGP welcome
>>
>> Stefan Müller       Tel: (+49) (+30) 838 52973
>>                      Fax: (+49) (030) 838 4 52973
>> Institut für Deutsche und Niederländische Philologie
>> Deutsche Grammatik
>> Habelschwerdter Allee 45
>> 14 195 Berlin
>>
>> http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/~stefan/
>>
>> http://langsci-press.org/
>>
>> http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/Projects/CoreGram.html
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