[HPSG-L] Selection of phonology in nonlocal dependencies and raising
Stefan Müller
stefan.mueller at fu-berlin.de
Tue Mar 8 16:10:50 UTC 2016
Dear Emily,
> Just a quick comment related to LOCAL (rather than PHON): I believe
> it to be the case that there is a dependency between having the LOCAL
> structure and the lexical threading/head amalgamation approach to
> long distance dependencies of Bouma et al 2001. That is, I think
> it's important to that analysis that what is matched between filler
> and gap is the LOCAL value only.
But Ivan assumes an amalgamation analysis in his SBCG work, doesn't he?
I think he does not provide the lexical rule for extraction but gives
example lexical items instead. But the idea is nevertheless there.
Of course the purpose of LOCAL was to group exactly those features that
are shared in nonlocal dependencies. If this is gone now, we have to
make this explicit. Trace-based proposals will not work if all PHON and
SYN and SEM are identified, since traces have an empty PHON value and
fillers do not.
In Ivan's approach the PHON of the filler could be visible in the ARG-ST
list of the head. That would not hurt in an amalgamation analysis
(except for the locality issues, I mentioned). But it would hurt in a
trace-based analysis since there the PHON value has to be specified.
Another issue related to this is partial verb phrase fronting (PVP) in
German, which was treated by Höhle, Detmar and me by assuming that the
features that play a role in verbal complex formation are not shared in
nonlocal dependencies. This is set up easily by assuming that this
feature (the LEX feature) is outside LOCAL. If there is no LOCAL, we
have a problem. Of course one could stipulate indivdual structure
sharings into SLASH but this seems to be against the spirit of HPSG,
which uses structured information.
The discussion of LOCAL was already in the section I mentioned in my
original post. It contains all the PVP data and discussion.
Section 10.6.2, 10.6.2.2 on LOCAL
http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/~stefan/Pub/grammatical-theory.html
To me it seems that the feature geometry of Sag, 1997 (Constructional
HPSG) is better suited for what we have already than the SBCG one.
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
Am 01.03.16 um 16:36 schrieb Emily M. Bender:
> Just a quick comment related to LOCAL (rather than PHON): I believe
> it to be the case that there is a dependency between having the LOCAL
> structure and the lexical threading/head amalgamation approach to
> long distance dependencies of Bouma et al 2001. That is, I think
> it's important to that analysis that what is matched between filler
> and gap is the LOCAL value only.
>
> Emily
>
> On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 5:06 AM, David Moeljadi
> <davidmoeljadi at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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
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