Louisa Sadler

• Professor at University of Essex

This volume brings together eleven peer-reviewed articles on Arabic linguistics. The contributions fall under three areas of linguistics: Phonology and phonetics; syntax and semantics; and language acquisition, language contact, and diglossia. They reflect some various perspectives and emphases. Including data from North African, Levantine, and Gul...

It is standardly assumed that Arabic copula constructions with present tense interpretation involve either a null copula or a pronominal copula. This paper provides evidence that some Arabic vernaculars are developing a three-way split, with an additional copula form occurring in some predicational copula clauses. This form has grammaticalised out...

Cambridge Core - Grammar and Syntax - Lexical-Functional Grammar - by Kersti Börjars

This paper makes a contribution to our understanding of free relative clauses (frcs) in Maltese, in particular so-called plain, standard or non-ever free relative clauses. We demonstrate that such frcs are interpreted as definites, consistent with the findings in much previous literature on other languages. However, we also show that Maltese has no...

Examples such as these raise the question of how participants which are entailed by the lexical meaning of predicates are made explicit in the morpho‐ syntactic representation, and whether and under what conditions they may remain implicit: that is, issues of valency. In addition, they raise the question of alternations: that is, where two morpholo...

Imagine how the discipline of linguistics would be if expert practitioners of different theories met in a collaborative setting to tackle the same challenging data—to test the limits of their model’s infrastructure and examine how the concrete predictions of their theories differ about the same data. This book represents the result of attempting to...

We develop a detailed description of the differences and similarities between the syntax of restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses in Maltese. We show that Maltese makes use of both a complementiser strategy and a wh-pronoun strategy in each type of relative clause. We discuss in some detail the ways in which the distribution of gaps and...

This paper is concerned with the syntax of ditransitive verbs in Arabic.We concentrate on the vernaculars, focussing in particular on three geographically spread dialects: Egyptian Cairene Arabic, the dominant vernacular in Egypt, Hijazi Arabic, spoken in Western Saudi Arabia and Maltese, a mixed language with a Magrebi/Siculo-Arabic stratum. We sh...

The issue of verbal complementation patterns in the Arabic vernaculars is one which is relatively under-researched: this paper aims to make a small con-tribution in this area, focussing on essentially two issues (i) the syntax of so-called experiencer-object psychological predicates (EOPVs) (that is, predicates in the frighten or please classes) an...

This paper is concerned with the syntactic expression of three argument (ditransitive) predicates in Maltese. We provide the first detailed description of the ditransitive constructions found in Maltese, which have been largely ignored in the substantial literature on ditransitive predicates, and show that the primary means of expression for these...

This paper provides a descriptive overview of extra argumental or non-selected datives in Maltese, poorly described in existing grammars. We outline an LFG approach to the facts we describe bulding on existing LFG work and in particular on Kibort (2008)'s approach to dative arguments, extending her approach to the various subclasses of non-selected...

Bosse, Bruening and Yamada (2012) (BBY) provides a study of several constructions involving `non-selected' arguments, and outlines an approach to the syntax and semantics of one such construction: the Affected Experiencer (AE) construction. The syntactic analysis relies on abstract functional projections and particular assumptions about configurati...

This paper provides a descriptive overview of restrictive relative clauses (henceforth RRCs) in Maltese, a construction which has received little atten- tion to date and which is poorly described in existing grammars. We outline an LFG approach to the facts we describe bulding on existing LFG work on relatives. Further we explore some issues raised...

At its simplest, morphosyntactic agreement may be viewed as involving linguistic objects which have the same values for a given feature. In contemporary constraint-based formalisms the relationship is usually modelled by structure sharing in the syntax; for predicate-argument agreement, most often it is assumed that the target and the controller pr...

Arnold and Sadler (2010) provides a 'Pottsian' analysis of supplemental constructions, in particular appositive (non-restrictive) relative clauses, in the framework of LFG and glue semantics. The account utilizes an inference rule that splits single glue resources into their 'at-issue' and supplemental sub-parts, and introduces other resources that...

It is well known that Australian languages make heavy use of nominal juxtaposition in a wide variety of functions, but there is little discussion in the theoretical literature of how such juxtapositions should be analysed. We discuss a range of data from Australian languages illustrating how multiple nominals share a single grammatical function wit...

We examine the formal encoding of feature indeterminacy, focussing on case indeterminacy as an exemplar of the phenomenon. Forms that are indeterminately specified for the value of a feature can simultaneously satisfy conflicting requirements on that feature and thus are a challenge to constraint-based formalisms which model the compatibility of in...

Abstract We propose an analysis of the adjectival construct in Arabic in LFG, building on previous work in LFG on a Welsh construction which shows several similarities to the Arabic (Mittendorf and Sadler, 2008) and work on the MSA and cognate Hebrew constructions by Hazout (2000); Kre- mers (2005); Siloni (2002); Heller (2002) and Kim (2002). The...

We explore a set of morphosyntactic feature asymmetries in coordinate structures in Welsh in the light of the theories of agreement and coordination in LFG, and draw out some consequences for the theory of agreement in LFG. 1 In classic LFG, a very simple view is taken of agreement phenomena such as person, number and gender agreement between finit...

In her recent Language paper, Tonhauser (2007, henceforth T07) provides a comprehensive in-depth discussion of the semantics of two nominal temporal markers occurring in Paraguayan Guaraní, based on her fieldwork study and subsequent Ph.D. T explicitly situates her article as arguing against the claims of our Language article (Nordlinger & Sadler 2...

Abstract In this article we examine,a Welsh adjectival construction which superficially looks simple but on closer examination proves to be somewhat,challenging. The construction contains an NP constituent whose GF status is far from clear. We consider various analyses of thi s NP, as SUBJ, OBJ and ADJ and suggest that on balance the evidence favou...

This paper explores the implications of data from a corpus study of Portuguese for our understanding of agreement processes involving coordinate structures (CSs). These data indicate serious limitations of most existing analyses of coordinate structures: this paper will suggest how they can be overcome. It demonstrates how corpus data can require a...

Abstract In cases of single conjunct agreement (SCA), the features of one conjunct within a coordinate structure control syntactic agreement between,the coordinate NP and agreement,targets external to that NP. This requires agreement,processes to see inside the f-structure representation of the coordinate structure. Despite its intuitive simplicity...

We propose an analysis in lfg of a particular asymmetric sentential coordination pattern in Welsh. In this construction, the main verb of the first clause is marked for tense and the remaining conjuncts have non-finite verb forms. This single instance of tense marking (occurring on the finite verb of the first conjunct) is semantically interpreted...

Case stacking, the phenomenon whereby a single word may bear multiple cases reflecting its relation to a number of different syntactic elements, is an important phenomenon both for the development of theories of inflectional morphology and for our understanding of the relation between morphology and syntax. However, to date it has received virtuall...

This paper offers a contribution to the treatment of agreement phenomena in LFG by providing an analysis of Rumanian nominal agreement, focussing on gender. I take up two issues concerned with gender marking and agreement in Ru- manian. The first of these is the apparent mismatch between the number of nominal controller genders (three), and the num...

Abstract Using data from a range of Australian languages, in this paper we argue for an analysis of various nominal appositional structures as syntactic coordinations (i.e. as hybrid f-structures) in LFG. We show that this provides a simple and straightforward account of the surface syntactic similarities among,a range of juxtaposed construction ty...

Abstract A peculiarity of Welsh and the other Celtic languages is their system of Initial Mu- tations. These are regular alternations of word-initial phonemes,triggered by a variety of lexical and syntactic triggering contexts. This feature of the Celtic languages poses a number of challenges to grammatical description, not least because it require...

Abstract This paper discusses the NP-internal agreement,strategies observed in an empirical (corpus based) study of Portuguese, and proposes an analy- sis which is formalized in the framework,of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar,(HPSG). The empirical study suggests that what were previously thought to be rare or non-existent strategies occur wit...

Abstract Agreement mismatches in number, gender or case present an interesting challenge to any grammatical theory. We consider two styles of analysis for a number mismatch in Welsh, which arises when nouns are modied by cardinal numbers. In this construction, the nominal must be singular. One analysis pursues the idea that the nominal is an argume...

Syntactically annotated corpora are very valuable resources that can be used to provide cru- cial evidence for the occurrence of particular linguistic constructions in a given language. In the case of agreement processes, the analysis of the different strategies found in a language with a rich agreement profile is paramount for testing the limits o...

It is a general assumption in linguistic theory that the categories of tense, aspect, and mood (TAM) are inflectional categories of verbal classes only. In a number of languages around the world, however, nominals and other NP constituents are also inflected for these categories. In this article we provide a comprehensive survey of tense/aspect/moo...

It is generally held that clausal temporal, aspectual and modal features,when encoded morphologically, are expressed by or on clausalheads. However nominals and modifiers within NP can also be inflected fortense, aspect and modal featuresinterpreted with respect to the clausal predication rather than withrespect to the nominal argument itself. Such...

Sadler and Nordlinger (2001) provides a descriptive overview of the phe-nomenon of independent nominal tense, whereby tense marking on a nominal temporally situates the nominal itself, independent of the tense of the proposi-tion. In this paper we build on this descriptive work by exploring the lines along which an lfg analysis might be developed o...

Horizontal redundancy is inherent to lcxica consisting of descriptions of fully formed objects. This causes an unwelcome expansion of the lexical database and increases parsing time. To eliminate it, direct relations between descriptions of fifily formed objects are often defined.

We present two companion methods for automatically enriching phrase-structure oriented treebank resources with functional structures. Both methods define systematic patterns of correspondence between partial PS configurations and functional structures. These are applied to PS rules extracted from treebanks, or to flat term representations of treeba...

Theoretical research in the area of machine translation usu- ally involves the search for and creation of an appropriate formalism. An important issue in this respect is the way in which the compositionality of translation is to be defined. In this paper, we will introduce the anaphoric component of the Mimo formalism. It makes the definition and t...

Abstract The morphosyntactic categories of tense, aspect and mood are traditionally considered to be proper- ties of verbs. However, the morphological expression of these categories within the nominal system is attested across a range of languages. Drawing on data from a number of languages, we provide a prelim- inary sketch of the phenomenon of no...

We present a method for automatically annotating treebank resources with functional structures. The method defines systematic patterns of correspondence between partial PS configurations and functional structures. These are applied to PS rules extracted from treebanks. The set of techniques which we have developed constitute a methodology for corpu...

Recent work in morphology in LFG (Nordlinger 1998, Sadler 1998, Barron 1998) has highlighted the fact that NPs in some languages inflect for the traditionally verbal categories of tense, aspect or mood (henceforth TAM). This phenomenon is extremely problematic for head-driven approaches such as HPSG, which assumes that clause-level information will...

This paper focusses on the English adjectival resultative construction, as exemplified in examples (1)-(4). (1) John hammered the metal flat. (2) The river froze solid. (3) The dog barked itself hoarse. (4) The dog barked the neighbours awake. Result predication occurs with both transitive and intransitive verbs. In the transitive case, the result...

We examine the periphrastic passive construction in Latin, in which a part of the verb paradigm is expressed by an auxiliary/copular verb `to be' with the perfective passive participle, having the syntax of a predicative adjective construction. We show that an analysis of this construction offered by Brjars, Vincent and Chapman 1997 within the LFG...

We consider various analyses of certain asymmetries concerning morphosyntactic features in coordinate structures in Welsh in the light of the theories of agreement and of coordination in LFG. In classic LFG, a very simple view is taken of agreement phenomena such as person, number and gender agreement between nite verbs and their subjects, or gende...

Statistical approaches to processing Lexical Functional Grammars (LFG-DOP, [1]) require large corpora of text annotated with c-structure and f-structure representations. To date, such corpora that exist are constructed manually or semi-automatically. Manual construction is both time-consuming and error-prone. Semi-automatic construction usually pro...

In a recent paper (van Genabith et al., 1999) describe a semi-automatic method for annotating tree banks with high level Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) fstructure representations. First, a CFPSG is automatically induced from the tree bank using the method described in (Charniak, 1996). The CF-PSG is then manually annotated with functional schemat...

The standard view of English reduced auxiliaries takes them to be (postlexical) clitics (Kaisse 1983). However, Spencer (1991) puts forward some persuasive arguments that a subset of these forms, the non-syllabic reduced auxiliaries, are actually affixes (tense inflections) rather than clitics, while the syllabic reduced auxiliaries are post-lexica...

this paper is organized as follows. We first provide a brief introduction to relevant aspects of Russian morphology and nominalization. We then turn to the question of the argument structure of deverbal nominals, providing a short summary of Grimshaw's analysis of English nominalizations. The following sections focus on the Russian data and the dat...

Kaplan et al (1989) present an approach to machine translation based on co-description. In this paper we show that the notation is not as natural and expressive as it appears. We first show that the most natural analysis proposed in Kaplan et al (1989) cannot in fact cover the range of data for the important translational phenomenon in question. Th...

this paper - all errors are my responsibility. I began working on these issues while a Visiting Scholar in Cognitive Science at CSLI during Autumn 1996, am opportunity for which I am very grateful. 1 LFG98 --- L. Sadler: Welsh NPs without Head Movement 2

This article provides a brief introduction to a number of key advances in LFG since the late 1980s. A description of the framework itself is given in Neidle (this volume), which provides an overview of the 1982 version of the theory, together with a sketch of a major subsequent development, Lexical Mapping Theory. LFG as a framework for linguistic...

Bresnan (1997) proposes a model of constituent structure revolving around two universal modes of organisation - endocentricity and lexicocentricity. For endocentric structures, a set of universal principles of structure-function association provides a canonical mapping from nodes to f-structures. This model proposes a highly constrained view of con...

this report. Contents 1 Introduction 3 2 Background 6 3 Response to Academics' Questionnaire 9 3.1 Introduction : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 9 3.2 Description of Students : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 9 3.3 Desciption of Course Instructor : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 9 3.4 Course description :...

This paper proposes an analysis of adjectival constructions in HPSG, focussing on the behaviour of adjectives in NP, and develops an account of the familiar observation that adjectives without complements typically precede the noun, while those with complements or post-modifiers typically follow the noun. 1. INTRODUCTION Adjectives in English appea...

In this paper we examine the morphology of the Russian verb system.1/2 We propose that a curious morphological restriction on the formation of certain types of deverbal nominalization provides indirect, but compelling, evidence in favour of a realizational approach to Russian conjugation over a morpheme based approach of the kind prevalent in recen...

This paper aims to demonstrate that there is no adequate treatment of adjectives in NP in English, and attempts to remedy this. The central problem is to account for the syntactic and semantic differences between prenominal and postnominal adjectival constructions as in (i)–(iv): (i) the navigable river (ii) the rivers navigable (iii) *the navigabl...

The primary aim of this contribution is to provide an editorial introduction to this Special Issue ofMachine Translation dedicated to Evaluation. The intention is to describe the rationale for the Issue, outline the various contributions of the papers in this issue, and try to situate them in a wider context. As part of providing this wider context...

A Test Suite (TS) is typically a collection of Natural Language sentences against which the coverage of a Natural Language Processing system can be evaluated. We describe a method by which such suites can be produced automatically, involving a modification and extension of the Definite Clause Grammar formalism, and describe some of the advantages o...

Substantial formal grammatical and lexical resources exist in various NLP systems and in the form of textbook specifications. In the present paper we report on experimental results obtained in manual, semi-automatic and automatic migration of entire computational or textbook descriptions (as opposed to a more informal reuse of ideas or the design o...

This paper is mainly concerned with the rule-based approach to Machine Translation. It begins with some general remarks on the re-lation between rule-based and empirical approaches to MT, stressing the importance of the diversity of goals for MT research and the con-tributions both types of approach can make. In the following section, an assessment...

This paper proposes an analysis of adjectival constructions in HPSG, focussing on the behaviour of adjectives in NP, and develops an account of the familiar observation that adjectives without complements typically precede the noun, while those with comple-ments or post-modifiers typically follow the noun.

The normal method for representing anaphoric dependencies in Unification Based grammar formalisms is that of . In this paper, we address the problems that this representational device poses when such formalisms are used for translation. We demonstrate the inadequacies of existing proposals, and describe an approach which exploits the expressive pos...

This paper describes what we take to be the correct perspective on the 'empiri- cist' vs 'rationalist' debate which is the dominant theme of this workshop, and describes a technique for dealing with the translation problems that arise where languages differ in the conditions they impose, and the strategies they employ for expressing different kinds...

There have been important developments in computationally oriented linguistic theory in the last 10 years, in particular, the development of formalisms based on UNIFICATION. This is already important as regards Machine Translation research, and will become increasingly so as the next generation of practical MT systems evolves. One purpose of this p...

We discuss some different ideas about the sort of formalism appropriate for translation (more specifically, transfer) that have been explored within Eurotra. The intention is not to evaluate these different ideas, but to outline the issues of general interest and relevance that they raise. Section 1 describes some common assumptions, section 2 desc...

The purpose of this paper is to describe and motivate the leading ideas behind the MiMo notation, a formalism for transfer-based machine translation which is especially appropriate for intermediate representations based on Dependency Grammar. The most important of these ideas concern properties of the translation relation such as compositionality,...

High quality training corpora are crucial for statistical approaches to natural lan-guage processing. For probabilistic Lexical Functional Grammars (LFG-DOP, (Bod R. & Kaplan R. 1998)) significant corpora of texts associated with both c-structure and f-structure representations are required. This poses an impor-tant acquisition problem: manual cons...

It is well known that Australian languages make heavy use of nominal apposition. However there is little discussion in the theoretical liter ature of how such appositional structures should be analysed syntactically. We present a range of data from Australian languages illustrating how multiple nominals share a single gramamtical function within th...

Abstract In this paper, we present an analysis of classifier noun incor poration in Gunwinyguan lan- guages from northern Australia, focussing particularly on generic specific constructions. We show how the analysis of Sadler and Nordlinger (2006) for generic-specific constructions forms through nominal juxtaposition can be extended to account for...

In this paper we examine the interaction of a number of grammatical phenomena in Wubuy, a polysynthetic language from northern Australia, and show how they can be given a comprehensive analysis within the framework of LFG. While each of these phenomena – noun incorporation, verbal agreement, coordination and external possession – has received vario...

Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) uses five different particles to express sentential negation: the invariant particle maa, the particle laa and its tensed counterparts lam (PAST) and lan (FUT), and laysa which is marked only for SUBJ agreement. Partial analyses of these elements are offered in other frameworks, notably Minimalism (Shlonsky, 1997; Benma...