Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-21T15:13:23.211Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Representing argument structure1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2016

LIVNAT HERZIG SHEINFUX ,
NURIT MELNIK  and
SHULY WINTNER
LIVNAT HERZIG SHEINFUX*
Affiliation:
University of Haifa
NURIT MELNIK*
Affiliation:
The Open University
SHULY WINTNER*
Affiliation:
University of Haifa
*
Author’s address: University of Haifa, Israel[email protected]
Author’s address: The Open University, Israel[email protected]
Author’s address: University of Haifa, Israel[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Existing approaches to the representation of argument structure in grammar tend to focus either on semantics or on syntax. Our goal in this paper is to strike the right balance between the two levels by proposing an analysis that maintains the independence of the syntactic and semantic aspects of argument structure, and, at the same time, captures the interplay between the two levels. Our proposal is set in the context of the development of a large-scale grammar of Modern Hebrew within the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Consequently, an additional challenge it faces is to reconcile two conflicting desiderata: to be both linguistically coherent and realistic in terms of the grammar engineering effort. We present a novel representation of argument structure that is fully implemented in HPSG, and demonstrate its many benefits to the coherence of our Hebrew grammar. We also highlight the additional dimensions of linguistic generalization that our proposal provides, which we believe are also applicable to grammars of other languages.

Keywords

argument structureHebrew grammarHPSGModern Hebrewsemantic selectionsyntactic selectionsyntax-semantics interface
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , 10 November 2017 , pp. 701 - 750
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[1]

This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no 505/11). We are indebted to Petter Haugereid for his contribution to this project in its earlier stages, and to Tali Arad Greshler and Adam Przepiórkowski for their help and advice with previous drafts of this paper. We are grateful to the Journal of Linguistics anonymous reviewers for many helpful and constructive comments. All remaining errors and misconceptions are, of course, our own.

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Chuck Fillmore (1929–2014) and Ivan Sag (1949–2013).

Abbreviations used in this paper for agreement are 1/2/3 = person; s/p = number; f/m = gender. In addition acc = accusative case.

References

Arad Greshler, Tali, Herzig Sheinfux, Livnat, Melnik, Nurit & Wintner, Shuly. 2015. Development of maximally reusable grammars: Parallel development of Hebrew and Arabic grammars. In Müller (ed.), 27–40.Google Scholar
Baker, Carl Leroy. 1968. Indirect questions in English. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Google Scholar
Baroni, Marco, Bernardini, Silvia, Ferraresi, Adriano & Zanchetta, Eros. 2009. The WaCky wide web: A collection of very large linguistically processed web-crawled corpora. Language Resources And Evaluation 43.3, 209–226.Google Scholar
Bender, Emily M., Flickinger, Dan & Oepen, Stephan. 2002. The grammar matrix: An open-source starter-kit for the rapid development of cross-linguistically consistent broad-coverage precision grammars. In Coling-02 Workshop on Grammar Engineering and Evaluation, 1–7. Morristown, NJ, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics; doi:10.3115/1118783.111878.Google Scholar
Bond, Francis, Oepen, Stephan, Nichols, Eric, Flickinger, Dan, Velldal, Erik & Haugereid, Petter. 2011. Deep open-source machine translation. Machine Translation 25.2, 87–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bonial, Claire, Hwang, Jena, Bonn, Julia, Conger, Kathryn, Babko-Malaya, Olga & Palmer, Martha. 2012. English PropBank annotation guidelines (Version 3.1) [Annotation guidelines].Google Scholar
Bouma, Gosse, Malouf, Rob & Sag, Ivan. 2001. Satisfying constraints on extraction and adjunction. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 19, 1–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butt, Miriam. 1995. The structure of complex predicates in Urdu (Dissertations in Linguistics Series). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Copestake, Ann. 1999. The (new) LKB system. Technical Report, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Copestake, Ann. 2002a. Definitions of typed feature structures. In Oepen, Stephan, Flickinger, Dan, Tsujii, Jun-ichi & Uszkoreit, Hans (eds.), Collaborative language engineering, 227–230. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Copestake, Ann. 2002b. Implementing typed feature structure grammars. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Copestake, Ann. 2009. Slacker semantics: Why superficiality, dependency and avoidance of commitment can be the right way to go. In The 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1–9. Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Copestake, Ann, Flickinger, Dan, Pollard, Carl & Sag, Ivan A.. 2005. Minimal recursion semantics: An introduction. Research on Language and Computation 3.2–3, 281–332; http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11168-006-6327-9.Google Scholar
Davis, Anthony R. & Koenig, Jean-Pierre. 2000. Linking as constraints on word classes in a hierarchical lexicon. Language 76.1, 56–91.Google Scholar
Dowty, David. 1991. Thematic proto-roles and argument selection. Language 67.3, 547–619.Google Scholar
Emonds, Joseph E. 1991. Subcategorization and syntax-based theta-role assignment. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 9.3, 369–429.Google Scholar
Fillmore, Charles. 1982. Frame semantics. Linguistics in the morning calm, 111–137. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing Co.Google Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J. 1968. The case for case. In Bach & Harms (eds.), Universals in linguistic theory, 1–88. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J. 1971. Some problems for case grammar. Monograph Series on Languages and Linguistics 24, 35–56.Google Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J. 2012. Encounters with language. Computational Linguistics 38.4, 701–718.Google Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J., Johnson, Christopher R. & Petruck, Miriam R. L.. 2003. Background to FrameNet. International Journal of Lexicography 16.3, 235–250.Google Scholar
Flickinger, Dan. 2000. On building a more efficient grammar by exploiting types. Natural Language Engineering 6.1, 15–28; doi:10.1017/S1351324900002370.Google Scholar
Grimshaw, Jane. 1979. Complement selection and the lexicon. Linguistic Inquiry 10.2, 279–326.Google Scholar
Gruber, Jeffrey Steven. 1965. Studies in lexical relations. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Haugereid, Petter. 2012. A grammar design accommodating packed argument frame information on verbs. International Journal of Asian Language Processing 22.3, 87–106.Google Scholar
Herzig Sheinfux, Livnat, Arad Greshler, Tali, Melnik, Nurit & Wintner, Shuly. 2015. Hebrew verbal multi-word expressions. In Müller (ed.), 122–135.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, Ray. 1985. Multiple subcategorization and the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D717}$ -criterion: The case of climb. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 3.3, 271–295.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, Ray. 1987. The status of thematic relations in linguistic theory. Linguistic Inquiry 18.3, 369–411.Google Scholar
Jaworski, Wojciech & Przepiórkowski, Adam. 2014a. Semantic roles in grammar engineering. The 3rd Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2014), 81–86. Association for Computational Linguistics and Dublin City University; http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/S14-1011.Google Scholar
Jaworski, Wojciech & Przepiórkowski, Adam. 2014b. Syntactic approximation of semantic roles. Advances in natural language processing: The 9th International Conference on NLP (PolTAL 2014), 193–201. Springer International Publishing.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Ronald & Bresnan, Joan. 1982. Lexical functional grammar: A formal system for grammatical representation. In Bresnan, Joan (ed.), The mental representation of grammatical relations, 173–281. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kingsbury, Paul & Palmer, Martha. 2003. Propbank: The next level of treebank. The Second Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories, 105–116. Växjö, Sweden.Google Scholar
Koenig, Jean-Pierre & Davis, Anthony R.. 2006. The key to lexical semantic representations. Journal of Linguistics 42.1, 71–108.Google Scholar
Levin, Beth. 1993. English verb classes and alternations: A preliminary investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Müller, Stefan(ed.). 2015. The 22nd International Conference on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Oepen, Stephan. 2001. [incr tsdb()]– competence and performance laboratory. User manual. Technical Report, Computational Linguistics, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.Google Scholar
Palmer, Martha, Gildea, Dan & Kingsbury, Paul. 2005. The proposition bank: A corpus annotated with semantic roles. Computational Linguistics 31.1, 71–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pesetsky, David. 1996. Zero syntax: Experiencers and cascades. Chicago, IL/Stanford, CA: University of Chicago Press/CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Pollard, Carl & Sag, Ivan A.. 1994. Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Przepiórkowski, Adam. 1999. On complements and adjuncts in Polish. In Borsley, Robert D. & Przepiórkowski, Adam (eds.), Slavic in HPSG, 183–210. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Przepiórkowski, Adam, Hajnicz, Elżbieta, Patejuk, Agnieszka, Woliński, Marcin, Skwarski, Filip & Świdzib́ski, Marek. 2014. Walenty: Towards a comprehensive valence dictionary of Polish. The 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2014), 2785–2792; http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/summaries/279.html.Google Scholar
Sag, Ivan A. & Pollard, Carl. 1991. An integrated theory of complement control. Language 67, 63–113.Google Scholar
Sag, Ivan A., Wasow, Thomas & Bender, Emily M.. 2003. Syntactic theory: A formal introduction, 2nd edn. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Schuler, Karin Kipper. 2005. VerbNet: A broad-coverage, comprehensive verb lexicon. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA, AAI3179808.Google Scholar
Sowa, John F. 2000. Knowledge representation: Logical, philosophical, and computational foundations. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks Cole Publishing Co.Google Scholar