[HPSG-L] Selection of phonology in nonlocal dependencies and raising
Stefan Müller
stefan.mueller at fu-berlin.de
Tue Mar 8 15:50:10 UTC 2016
Dear Dan, Berthold, Guy, David, Emily, Mike, Rob,
Uff, this was just in time. I was doing the final changes on the grammar
theory text book. I vaguely remembered the a/an distinction from
conversations with you (Dan) and Ivan. However, I thought that the noun
selects the determiner and this would not be sufficient for getting the
a/an distinction because of adjectives that may intervene between
determiner and noun. But of course, it works the other way round: if the
determiner selects the N' everything is fine.
I changed that section! Thanks, Dan!
I like the ERG approach to the a/an distinction since this keeps the
phonology out of local and hence out of nonlocal dependencies. But in
general I guess that Berthold is right that one should have a more
elaborate PHON representation as is common in papers dealing with
constraint-based phonology. Lots of stuff can be done there.
As for Georgian: This phenomenon would never cross clause-boundaries,
would it?
> 1) Adjacent phoneme(s)
> 2) Phonological features which might be claimed to be adjacent on a tier (vowel harmony, tone processes)
> 3) Non-adjacent phonemes within word (Georgian ex. above, although one could argue that this is (2); glottalization dissimilation in Quechua)
> 4) Phonemes adjacent across clitic boundaries (possibly differing by type of clitic)
> 5) Phonemes adjacent across major category word boundaries (liaison in French, mutation in Celtic languages)
Yes, but the general question is whether the phonology of "Chris" in the
following sentence can influence the internal structure of "that Peter saw".
Chris, Kim claims that Sandy believes that Peter saw.
If this is not the case then we can either say: "So what." or we have to
set up our theories in a way that rules this out. I would go for the "so
what" approach. But this means that all attemts to get stronger
constraints on locality of selection could also be given up.
We would just say: Do not look at this information, even though you
could (This is basically the locality principle of Pollard & Sag, 1987).
Best wishes
Stefan
PS: Talking about ERG, did you see that Bralich has a law suit going ...
It was on the Linguist List.
St.
--
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
Am 29.02.16 um 19:28 schrieb Dan Flickinger:
> 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. 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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>
Dear Dan, hpsg-l at listserv.linguistlist.org,
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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