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

Tue Mar 1 13:06:03 UTC 2016

Not long enough as in Georgia, maybe, but in Indonesian:
Prefix "ber-" becomes "be-" if the first syllable of the root ends with
"-er",
e.g. "b*er*-" + "k*er*ja" ("k*er*" is the first syllable) > "b*e*k*er*ja"
(not *b*er*k*er*ja)
       "b*er*-" + "t*er*nak" ("t*er*" is the first syllable) > "b*e*t*er*nak"
(not *b*er*t*er*nak)

On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 7:10 PM, Guy Emerson <gete2 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> 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
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> HPSG-L mailing list
> >> HPSG-L at listserv.linguistlist.org
> >> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/hpsg-l
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> HPSG-L mailing list
> >> HPSG-L at listserv.linguistlist.org
> >> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/hpsg-l
> >>
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > HPSG-L mailing list
> > HPSG-L at listserv.linguistlist.org
> > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/hpsg-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> HPSG-L mailing list
> HPSG-L at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/hpsg-l
>