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Proceedings of LFG10 PARTICLE VERBS IN COMPUTATIONAL LFGS: ISSUES FROM ENGLISH, GERMAN, AND HUNGARIAN Martin Forst , Tracy Holloway King , and Tibor Laczko´ † † ‡ Microsoft Corp. , University of Debrecen † ‡ Proceedings of the LFG10 Conference Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King (Editors) 2010 CSLI Publications http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/ 228 Abstract We present the ways in which particle verbs are implemented in two rela- tively mature computational grammars, the English and the German ParGram LFGs, and we address the issues that arise with respect to particle verbs in the developmentof a computationalLFG for Hungarian. Considerations con- cerning the ParGram LFG implementation of productive Hungarian particle + verb combinations raise questions as to their treatment in the other two grammars. In addition to providing analyses for English, German, and Hun- garian particle verbs, we use these phenomena to highlight how constraints on available lexical resources can affect the choice of analysis and how de- tailed implementations of related phenomena in typologically different lan- guages can positively guide the analyses in all of the languages. 1 Introduction In a number of languages, especially Germanic and Finno-Ugric, there are classes of verbs commonly called “particle verbs” (Ackerman, 1983; Pi˜n´on, 1992; L¨udeling, 2001; Toivonen, 2001; Booij, 2002).1 Particle verbs are verbs whose meaning and argument structure depend on the combination of a (base) verb and a particle. Of- ten the meaning and argument structure of a particle verb are not compositional, i.e. it is not predictable from the combination of its components, but it must be listed in the lexicon. An example of a meaning expressed by such a particle verb in English, German, and Hungarian2 is shown in (1). (1) a. He gave up the fight. (English) b. Er gab den Kampf auf. he gave the fight up ‘He gave up the fight.’ (German) c. O˝ fel#adta a k¨uzdelmet. he up#gave the fight ‘He gave up the fight.’ (Hungarian)3 1We would like to thank the audience of LFG10 for their comments on the abstract and pre- sentation of this paper. Tibor Laczk´ogratefully acknowledges that his research reported here has been supported by OTKA (Hungarian Scientific Research Fund), grant number: K 72983, by the Re- search Group for Theoretical Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at the Universities of Debrecen, P´ecs and Szeged, and by the TAMOP´ 4.2.1./B-09/1/KONV-2010-0007 project, which is implemented through the New Hungary Development Plan, co-financed by the European Social Fund and the European Regional Development Fund. The authors are listed alphabetically. 2In Hungarian, what we refer to here as “particles” are often referred to as “preverbs” in the linguistic literature. Since that term is not adequate for the particles in English phrasal verbs, and for ease of exposition, we use the “particle” terminology. 3The ‘#’ sign is not part of the regular orthography. We use it to indicate the boundary between particles and base verb forms when these are spelled as one word, following a convention used in a number of computational language resources. 229 However, particle verbs can also be compositional, as shown in (2) for some directional particles, and highly productive, which is a challenge for the coverage of computational grammars (Villavicencio, 2003). (2) a. Push them up/in/out. (English) b. Push up/in/out the boxes. (English) In this paper, we present the ways in which particle verbs are implemented4 in two relatively mature computational grammars, the English and the German ParGram LFGs (Butt et al., 1997, 2002), and we address the issues that arise with respect to particle verbs in the subsequent development of a computational LFG for Hungarian. We will see that considerations concerning the ParGram LFG imple- mentation of productive Hungarian particle + verb combinations raise questions as to the current treatment in the other two grammars, especially as regards the anal- ysis of highly productive particle verbs. An additional interesting phenomenon brought to light by Hungarian is a set of particles which exhibit inflectional prop- erties; we outline an LFG analysis of this phenomenon which is similar to that of incorporated pronouns, e.g. with Welsh prepositions (Sadler, 1999). Thus, in this paper we provide analyses for English, German, and especially Hungarian particle verbs. We also use these phenomena and our experience creat- ing computational grammars which account for them to highlight how constraints on available lexical resources can, sometimes negatively, affect the choice of anal- ysis and how detailed implementations of related phenomena in typologically dif- ferent languages can positively guide the analyses and implementations in all of the languages. 2 Particle verbs — syntactic or morphological objects? English particle verbs are typically analyzed in such a way that the two components are separately inserted in their respective syntactic positions. This is not surprising given that particles are always written as separate words in English and short NPs can intervene between base verbs and particles, as in (3). (3) a. They threw it/the trash out. (English) b. They cut them/the onions up. (English) c. They bandied it about. (English) In German and Hungarian, however, particle + verb combinations are generally spelled as a single word when the particle immediately precedes the verb. How- ever, variation with respect to the spelling as one or two words can be observed with semantically compositional particle + verb combinations. This particle + verb 4Throughout the paper we use standard LFG notation for rules and lexical entries. The imple- mented grammars use the XLE notation described in Crouch et al. (2010), which is a variant of the LFG notation which uses the ascii character set. 230 order is in a way the default order, since only clearly definable conditions (V1 and V2 in German; focus, negation, imperatives, etc. in Hungarian) cause particles to appear in positions other than the immediately preverbal one.5 Even German and Hungarian verbs that do not exist on their own, but only in combination with parti- cles, e.g. aus#flippen ‘to flip/freak out’ (German; *flippen) and be#fejez ‘to finish’ (Hungarian; *fej-ez), appear with the particle separate from the verb in these con- ditions, as in (4) and (5). (4) a. weil er immer so schnell aus#flippt. because he always so quickly out freaks ‘. because he is always freaking out so quickly.’ (German) b. Er flippt immer so schnell aus. he freaks always so quickly out ‘He is always freaking out so quickly.’ (German) (5) a. J´anos be#fej-ez-te a k¨onyv-et. John.NOM PV#head-VSUFF-PAST.3SG.DEF the book-ACC ‘John finished the book.’ (Hungarian) b. J´anos nem fej-ez-te be a k¨onyv-et. John.NOM not head-VSUFF-PAST.3SG.DEF PV the book-ACC ‘John did not finish the book.’ (Hungarian) As a result of this behavior, there is substantial controversy in the linguistic literature concerning the status of particle + verb combinations as syntactic or morphological objects. We will argue for a uniformly syntactic treatment of par- ticles along the lines of Pi˜n´on (1992) and E.´ Kiss (1992, 2005) (for Hungarian), and L¨udeling (2001) (for German) across the LFG implementations for the three languages, and offer analyses that nevertheless capture the lexical properties of particle verbs in a principled manner. 3 Current Implementations in the ParGram LFGs In this section we present the current analyses used in the broad coverage English (Riezler et al., 2002) and German (Dipper, 2003; Rohrer and Forst, 2006) ParGram grammars. Both grammars aim to capture the often-idiosyncratic meaning of the particle verbs by forming a composite PRED, while allowing for the particle and verb to appear separated in the c-structure, an analysis which is enabled by the LFG projection architecture. However, due to differences in the morphologies of the two languages, in certain constructions, namely when the particle immediately precedes the verb in German, the analyses diverge at the lexical and hence at the c-structure level. 5For an overview of the most important instances of this separation in German and Hungarian, see Pi˜n´on (1992). 231 3.1 English As verb particles are always spelled as separate words in English, particle verbs receive a syntactic analysis in the English ParGram LFG. The lexical entries of verb particles contribute a feature called PRT-FORM, which records the form of the respective particle. The lexical entries of base verbs introduce the semantic form of the particle verb with its argument structure. Finally, the lemma of the base verb and the form of the particle are concatenated via an implementational device (CONCAT) so that the combination of the two, rather than just the lemma of the base verb, is the PRED of the f-structure. All particle verbs are listed with their argument structures in the verb lexicon of the grammar, and they appear under the corresponding base verb, but restricted to co-occurring with the appropriate particle. In (6) are the lexical entries involved in the analysis of the English example sentence He gave the fight up.6 The verb give can appear with a SUBJ and OBJ only if there is a PRT-FORM up, which will be provided by the particle. The PRED value for the verb is formed by the CONCAT template which takes the lexical verb form (%stem = give), a hash mark (#), and the PRT-FORM (up) and concatenates them to create a new form (%NewPred = give#up). The resulting c- and f-structures are shown in (7). (6) give V ( PRED) = 0%NewPred<( SUBJ)( OBJ)>0 (↑ PRT-FORM) = up ↑ ↑ ↑ c @(CONCAT %stem # ( PRT-FORM) %NewPred). ↑ up PART ( PRT-FORM) = up.
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