Constituent Coordination in Lexical-Functional Grammar 199 RONALD M
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FORMAL ISSUES IN LEXICAL-FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR CSLI Lecture Notes No. 47 FORMAL ISSUES IN LEXICAL-FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR edited by Mary Dalrymple, Ronald M. Kaplan, John T. Maxwell III, Annie Zaenen Publications CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE AND INFORMATION STANFORD, CALIFORNIA Copyright ©1995 Center for the Study of Language and Information Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States 99 98 97 96 95 54321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Formal issues in lexical-functional grammar / edited by Mary Dalrymple, Ronald M. Kaplan, John T. Maxwell III, Annie Zaenen. p. cm. — (CSLI lecture notes; no. 47) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-881526-37-2. — ISBN 1-881526-36-4 (pbk.). 1. Lexical-functional grammar I. Dalrymple, Mary. II. Series. P158.25.F67 1994 415 — dc20 94-26186 CIP CSLI was founded early in 1983 by researchers from Stanford University, SRI Internation- al, and Xerox PARC to further research and development of integrated theories of lan- guage, information, and computation. CSLI headquarters and CSLI Publications are lo- cated on the campus of Stanford University. CSLI Lecture Notes report new developments in the study of language, information, and computation. In addition to lecture notes, the series includes monographs, working pa- pers, and conference proceedings. Our aim is to make new results, ideas, and approaches available as quickly as possible. Contents Contributors vii Introduction ix Part I Formal Architecture 1 1 The Formal Architecture of Lexical-Functional Grammar 7 RONALD M. KAPLAN 2 Lexical-Functional Grammar: A Formal System for Grammatical Representation 29 RONALD M. KAPLAN AND JOAN BRESNAN Part II Nonlocal Dependencies 131 3 Long-distance Dependencies, Constituent Structure, and Functional Uncertainty 137 RONALD M. KAPLAN AND ANNIE ZAENEN 4 Modeling Syntactic Constraints on Anaphoric Binding 167 MARY DALRYMPLE, JOHN T. MAXWELL III, AND ANNIE ZAENEN 5 An Algorithm for Functional Uncertainty 177 RONALD M. KAPLAN AND JOHN T. MAXWELL III 6 Constituent Coordination in Lexical-Functional Grammar 199 RONALD M. KAPLAN AND JOHN T. MAXWELL III vi / CONTENTS Part III Word Order 211 7 Formal Devices for Linguistic Generalizations: West Germanic Word Order in LFG 215 ANNIE ZAENEN AND RONALD M. KAPLAN 8 Linear Order, Syntactic Rank, and Empty Categories: On Weak Crossover 241 JOAN BRESNAN Part IV Semantics and Translation 275 9 Projections and Semantic Description in Lexical-Functional Grammar 279 PER-KRISTIAN HALVORSEN AND RONALD M. KAPLAN 10 Situation Semantics and Semantic Interpretation in Constraint-Based Grammars 293 PER-KRISTIAN HALVORSEN 11 Translation by Structural Correspondences 311 RONALD M. KAPLAN, KLAUS NETTER, JURGEN WEDEKIND AND ANNIE ZAENEN Part V Mathematical and Computational Issues 331 12 Three Seductions of Computational Psycholinguistics 339 RONALD M. KAPLAN 13 Logic and Feature Structures 369 MARK JOHNSON 14 A Method for Disjunctive Constraint Satisfaction 381 JOHN T. MAXWELL III AND RONALD M. KAPLAN 15 The Interface between Phrasal and Functional Constraints 403 JOHN T. MAXWELL III AND RONALD M. KAPLAN Name Index 431 Subject Index 437 Contributors JOAN BRESNAN is Howard H. and Jesse T. Watkins University Professor at Stanford University. She co-designed the first formal theory of LFG in 1978 with Ron Kaplan. Her research interests have included lexicalist syntax, computational psycholinguistic modelling, and issues in universal grammar and natural language typology. MARY DALRYMPLE is a researcher in the Natural Language Theory and Technology group at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and a Consulting Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford Univer- sity. Her recent work focuses on the syntax-semantics interface. PER-KRISTIAN HALVORSEN is a Principal Scientist and Laboratory Man- ager for the Information Sciences and Technologies Laboratory at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. He holds appointments as consulting pro- fessor in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University and as professor (II) at the University of Oslo. Dr. Halvorsen is a co-author of the book Situations, Language and Logic and has published widely in the areas of linguistics and natural language semantics. MARK JOHNSON is Associate Professor in the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University. He is interested in the com- putational properties of natural language syntax and semantics. RONALD M. KAPLAN is a Research Fellow at the Xerox Palo Alto Re- search Center, where he heads the Natural Language Theory and Tech- nology group. He is also a Consulting Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University and a Principal of the Center for the Study of Language and In- formation. He is a co-designer of the formal theory of Lexical-Functional Grammar and the creator of its initial computational implementation. VII viii / CONTRIBUTORS JOHN T. MAXWELL III is a researcher in the Natural Language Theory and Technology group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. His work mostly focuses on formal complexity. KLAUS NETTER is a computational linguist whose research concentrates on German syntax in constraint-based grammar formalisms, machine translation and the structure of the lexicon. He has worked at the In- stitute for Natural Language Processing at the University of Stuttgart and is currently working at the German AI Center in Saarbriicken. JURGEN WEDEKIND is a researcher at the Institute for Natural Language Processing at the University of Stuttgart. His research mostly concen- trates on algorithmic problems. ANNIE ZAENEN is the director of the Multilingual Technology and Theory area in the Grenoble Laboratory of the Rank Xerox Research Centre, Prance and a Consulting Associate Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. She works on natural language syntax and lexical issues. Introduction The year 1982 saw the publication of The Mental Representation of Gram- matical Relations, the first collection of papers on the theory of Lexical- Functional Grammar. Since the publication of that volume, the growing body of work within the LFG framework has shown the advantages of an explicitly formulated, non-transformational approach to syntax, and the influence of this theory has been extensive. LFG is particularly distin- guished by its use of formally different representations for linguistically different kinds of information, and we believe that this is one important factor that has enabled LFG to provide new insights into linguistic struc- ture. These insights have in turn shaped the theory in both formal and substantive ways. Unfortunately, however, many of the developments in the formal the- ory of LFG since the publication of the 1982 volume have not been readily available to a wide audience. Many papers elaborating new proposals have appeared only in conference proceedings or as technical reports, or have never been published at all. It has been difficult for the larger linguistic community to learn about and make use of the advances that have been made. As a partial remedy to this situation, we have pulled together into a single volume a set of papers by ourselves and our colleagues that address some of the developments of the past years. This book outlines work in formal issues in LFG theory in the twelve year period from 1982 to 1994. We have included papers on a range of topics that have been central in LFG research during this period. In particular, we have tried to include those papers which have been most influential as well as those that have previously been most inaccessible. Each section of this book contains papers that address a central issue in the development of the theory. We have provided an introduction to each section to give a sense of the historical context in which these papers IX x / INTRODUCTION were written and to make clear how the papers fit in with other work in LFG and other frameworks before and since they were written. Part I of the book, "Formal Architecture", reproduces the Kaplan and Bresnan paper "Lexical-Functional Grammar: A Formal System for Grammatical Representation" from the original 1982 volume. Since that volume is now out of print, we thought it useful to include this pa- per, both as an overview of the original LFG theory and as a backdrop against which later developments can be viewed. The other paper in Part I, Kaplan's "The Formal Architecture of Lexical-Functional Gram- mar" , gives an overview of the current state of LFG formal theory and provides a preview of the material covered in more detail in the remainder of the book. Among the advances in the theory of functional structure since the publication of the 1982 volume is the ability to characterize nonlocal relations between f-structures, allowing for a formally well-defined treat- ment of long-distance dependencies and constraints on anaphoric binding. Part II of the book, "Nonlocal Dependencies", details the developments of this aspect of the theory, including an account of the interaction of co- ordination with long-distance relations. More recently, work on anaphoric binding by Strand (1992) and Culy, Kodio, and Togo (1995) and on the interpretation of wh-in-situ by Huang (1993) has built on these formal developments, applying them in new ways and to new sets of data. Earlier work within LFG on the word order and constituency puz- zles in Dutch and other Germanic languages (e.g., Bresnan et al. 1982) showed the success of an approach relying on the explicit separation of different kinds of syntactic information into