Prevailing approaches do not have a computational lexicon

[Carl Pollard]

Hi Mark,

>
>Are you referring here to examples of syncretism (or neutrality, or
>underspecification, as opposed to ambiguity) like the celebrated
>
>    Er findet und hilft Frauen
>    he finds  and helps women-ACC/DAT
>
>If so, what would it mean (in your terms) to analyze this in terms
>of what you called feature cancellation?
>
Yes -- you know about the 1995 ACL paper that Sam Bayer and I wrote (you
can get it from my Web page), and Sam's Language paper a year or so
later.
>>

There are (at least) a couple of serious problems with analyzing
syncretism in terms of Lambek's meet ($\sqcap$) operation. The first
one you're probably already aware of: that there is no way to
neutralize [F a, G b] and [F c, G d] without also getting
[F a, G d] and [F c, G b] in the mix.

The other is a foundational problem with the "frame semantics" (= the
prosodic interpretation of types as strings), pointed out in Neal
Whitman's (2002) dissertation: there is no way to distinguish
neutrality from ambiguity, under the standard assumption that
phonological identity entails prosodic identity. For example,
accusative and genitive neutralize in Polish (Dyla 1984) but
accusative and nominative don't, even when the forms are homophonous.
In order to retain the ambiguity/neutrality distinction and at
the same time the standard interpretation of meet as intersection
in the frame semantics, one must say that homophonous forms
that don't neutralize have distinct prosodies, e.g. the Polish
nominative and accusative interrogative pronouns have to have
distinct prosodies <co, 1> and <co, 2>. (This consequence was
arrived at independently by Whitman, and by Glyn Morrill (p.c.
to Whitman).)

Examples like this suggest three analytic options:

1. Continue to maintain that the ambiguity/neutrality distinction is
   syntactically based, but accept that prosodies can include a
   phonologically vacuous component (diacritic, uniquifier, index,
   subscript, whatever you want to call it). This is what Morrill
   (p.c.) opts for.

2. Say that the neutrality/ambiguity distinction has no syntactic
   basis, but rather, whether ambiguous forms can neutralize is
   governed by pragmatic factors. This is the tentative conclusion
   drawn by Whitman)

3. Continue to maintain BOTH that the ambiguity/neutrality distinction
   is syntactically based, and that prosody has no phonologically
   vacuous component, but that the type logic is something other than
   that of Lambek 1958/1961 (or elaborations thereof). This is the
   option I am exploring (but the type logic that I have found to
   work is not resource-sensitive).

Carl

>
That's a very interesting idea.  Given this set-up, can you predict what
aspects of grammar will show resource sensitivity and which ones won't?
>>

Metaphorically, you can use syntactic/semantic resources freely, but
you have to write IOU's every time. Prosody is the IOU's.

Carl