DOCSLIB.ORG

Another Look at Nominal Compounds

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Another Look at Nominal Compounds ANOTHER LOOK AT NOMINAL COMPOUNDS Pierre Isabelle D~partement de linguistique Universit~ de Montreal C.P. 6128, Succ. A, Montreal, Qua., Canada H)C )37 ABSTRACT semantics. And since noun meaning appears to be closely connected with knowledge of the world, one is led to explore the modes of interaction We present a progress report on our research between linguistic and conceptual knowledge. on nominal compounds (NC's). Recent approaches to this probiem in linguistics and natural ianguage From an NLP perspective, NC's have turned processing (NLP) are reviewed and criticized. We out to be an important stumbling block for sys- argue that the notion of "roie nominal", which is tems that attempt to deaI with real-iife text, at the interface of linguistic and extraiinguis- especiaIly in technical domains, for purposes tic knowledge, is crucial for characterizing NC'e such as machine translation (IsabeIle, to as weII as other Iinguistic phenomena. We examine appear), information retrieval, etc. a number of constraints on the semantic interpre- tation ruies for NC's. Proposals are made that Our ultimate goal is to develop an NLP sys- shouid improve the capability of NLP systems to tem capable of analyzing large classes of NC's in deaI with NC's. the sublanguage (Kittredge and Lehrberger, i982) of aircraft maintenance manuals. We do not aim at solving all cases, since we believe the problem to be exceedingly difficult. At the present stage I INTRODUCTION of our inquiry, we concentrate on the design of s suitable theoretical framework. A. Problem Statement In section II, we present a brief review of As a first approximation, we define a previous work in linguistics and NLP. In sections "nominal compound (NC) as s string of two or more III and IV, we examine two aspects of the seman- nouns having the same distribution as a singie tics of nouns that are crucially relevant to the noun, as in example (I): analysis of NC's: predicative nouns and role nominals. Finally, in section V, we explore pos- (1) aircraft bomb bay door actuating cylinders sible constraints on the semantic interpretation of NC's. We will see below that provisions have to be made in some cases for intervening adjectives. NC's can exhibit various degrees of lexica- II BACKGROUND lization, but we will focus our attention on productive rules for forming novel compounds. As to their surface syntax, NC's can assume any A. Approaches in Linguistics structure generated by the rule N --> N N; accor- dingly, their structural ambiguity grows exponen- The early study of Lees (1963) classified tially with their length (following the "Catalan NC's on purely grammatical criteria, and it sequence"). How, then, do we determine that the failed to provide constraints that could explain normal interpretation for (i) imposes the bracke- how NC's are semantically interpreted. ting shown in (2), rather than any of the other 41 syntactically possible bracketings? In s number of more recent studies, such as Levi (1978)9 there has been an attempt to view (2) ((aircraft ((bomb bay) door)) NC's as governed by tight semantic constraints. (actuating cylinder)) Thus, according to Levi, any novel NC realizes a pattern where either: a) the head noun is a deverbal naminalizstion and its modifier is interpreted as an argument of the related verb; B. Goal__ssof th___ee study or b) the two nouns are related by one of exactly nine deletable predicates ("is the cause of", "is We believe that the analysis of NC's repre- for", etc.). sents an important and largely unsolved problem. From a theoretical point of view this problem This reductionist attempt has been criti- raises the question of how to deal with noun cized, most notably by Downing (1977), on the 509 grounds that the interpretation of NC's crucially (3) a. measure nouns involves pragmatic knowledge, and that numerous map: objects onto quantities cases of NC's (such as thalidomide parents) will examples: speed (of), temperature (of), resist any analysis in terms of a closed set of volume (of), size (of) relations. These criticisms have led theorists like Selkirk (1982) to adopt the position that b. "area" nouns only "verbal compounds" (those constructed on a map: objects onto subparts pattern "argument + nominalization") are amenable examples: top (of), side (of), bottom to linguistic characterization; all other NC's (of), center (of), core (of) would have to be explained in separate extralin- guistic theories. c. collective nouns map: individuals onto sets examples: group (of), set (of) C. Approaches in NLP d. representational nouns Several systems have been developed in an map: objects onto representations of ob- NLP framework to deal with the problem of inter- jects preting NC's; two recent exempIes are reported in examples: picture (of), diagram (of), Finin (1980) and McDonaId (i982). sense (of) In both systems, the individual nouns of an e. other examples NC are first mapped onto conceptual representa- location (of), goal (of), tions where concepts are characterized by a set brother (of), king (of) of "roles" or "slots", and are arranged in an abstraction hierarchy. Interpreting a compound Most if not all of these argument-taking nouns then amounts to forming a derived concept on the can have their argument satisfied by a modifier basis of the constituent concepts; in most cases, noun in an NC: this is done by interpreting one of the concepts as a slot filler for the other. For example, the (a) a. oil temperature interpretation of steel adapter would involve b. box top inserting the concept associated with steel into c. tank group a RAW-MATERIAL slot within the representation of d. circuit diagram adapter. But the authors do not examine in any e. component location detail the question of eventual constraints on this interpretation process, such as the effect A treatment in terms of predicate/argument pat- of word order. terns for this type of NC seems far superior to Levi's (1978) use of the semantically empty Another crucial issue which has not been "deletable predicate" HAVE ("the component HAS a explored in sufficient detail, is the nature of, location"). Although these NC's are excluded from and the justification for the particular set of Selkirk's (1982) class of verbal compounds, they slots which is assigned to a given concept. Finin are amenable to the same type of semantic des- is somewhat more explicit on this question. Some cription. nouns have slots which represent standard case roles. Role nominals, on the other hand, are nouns which refer to a particular case role of B. Action and State Nominalizations another concept; for example, food refers to the object role of eat, and this fact provides the Most studies on NC's have recognized the key to the interpretation of cat food. This fact that deverbal nominalizations exhibit a notion will be examined in detail below. But semantic behavior closely related to that of the Finin also resorts to other types of slots (e.g. verb, and subcategorize elements that can occur "raw-material") which are not discussed. as modifier nouns in NC's. As mentioned above, these are in fact the only cases that Selkirk (1982) deems characterizable at the level of linguistic competence. III PREDICATIVE NOUNS 8ut there seems to be no reason why deadjec- tival nominalizations should be handled in a different way. In examples (5) and (6), an action A. Root Nouns with Arguments and a state are nominalized, with the argument occurring either in a prepositional phrase or as The fact that several classes of non-derived a modifier in an NC: nouns strictly subcategorize phrases which are semantically interpreted as arguments has (5) a. Someone removes the pump. received very little attention in the literature. b. removal of the pump This phenomenon would deserve an extensive study, c. pump removal and we can only give here some relevant examples, together with an indication of the semantic cate- (6) a. Uranium is scarce. gories between which the relation expressed by b. scarcity of uranium the noun effects a mapping: c. uranium scarcity 510 We are not claiming that there is exact A related claim underlies Zholkhovskij & synonymy betweenthe (b) and (c) examples, but Hel'cuk's (1971) use of certain "lexical func- only that they exhibit the same predicate/ tions": argument pattern. Action nominals can take various types of arguments in NC's, and sometimes (15) a. Sl(bUy) = buyer several of them simultaneously: b. S3(buy) = seller c. Sloc(battle) = battlefield (7) a. pump failure (subject) d. Sinst(See) = eyes b. Montreal flight (source, goal) (8) a. poppet chatter tendency where Si, $1o c and Sinst are defined as functions t~t yield the typical name of, respectively, the i- arrant, the location a-nd the instrument. IV ROLE NOMINALS Fillmore (1971) also makes a comparable proposal, when he suggests that the lexical entry of knife should include (16) as a component: A. Nominalizations (16) use: I of <V 0 1 A> Deverbal nominalizations can refer not only where V=cut to the action expressed by the verb, but also to the agent (driver), instrument (lubricant), pa- tient (employ-~-~and result (assembly) of this action. Except maybe for results, the term "role C. On the Definition of Role Nominals nominal" seems appropriate, since the nominaliza- tion refers to the filler of one of the roles of Mow exactly should we understand the notion the verb. Although these nouns are not, strictly of role nominals? Finin's statement that they speaking, predicative, they generally permit to refer to an underlying case role of a verb is not form NC's in which the other is interpreted as an accurate: they refer to role fillers, not to the argument of the underlying verb: roles themselves.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Charles J. Fillmore
    Obituary Charles J. Fillmore Dan Jurafsky Stanford University Charles J. Fillmore died at his home in San Francisco on February 13, 2014, of brain cancer. He was 84 years old. Fillmore was one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars of lexical meaning and its relationship with context, grammar, corpora, and computation, and his work had an enormous impact on computational linguistics. His early theoret- ical work in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s on case grammar and then frame semantics significantly influenced computational linguistics, AI, and knowledge representation. More recent work in the last two decades on FrameNet, a computational lexicon and annotated corpus, influenced corpus linguistics and computational lexicography, and led to modern natural language understanding tasks like semantic role labeling. Fillmore was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, and studied linguistics at the University of Minnesota. As an undergraduate he worked on a pre-computational Latin corpus linguistics project, alphabetizing index cards and building concordances. During his service in the Army in the early 1950s he was stationed for three years in Japan. After his service he became the first US soldier to be discharged locally in Japan, and stayed for three years studying Japanese. He supported himself by teaching English, pioneering a way to make ends meet that afterwards became popular with generations of young Americans abroad. In 1957 he moved back to the United States to attend graduate school at the University of Michigan. At Michigan, Fillmore worked on phonetics, phonology, and syntax, first in the American Structuralist tradition of developing what were called “discovery proce- dures” for linguistic analysis, algorithms for inducing phones or parts of speech.
    [Show full text]
  • Assigning Roles to Constituents of Sentences
    , " CHAPTER 19 Mechanisms of Sentence Processing: Assigning Roles to Constituents of Sentences J. L. McCLELLAND and A. H. KAWAMOTO MUL TIPLE CONSTRAINTS ON ROLE ASSIGNMENT Like many natural cognitive processes , the process of sentence comprehension involves the simultaneous consIderation of a large number of different sources of information. In this chapter, we con- sider one aspect of sentence comprehension: the assignment of the constituents of a sentence to the correct thematic case roles. Case role assignment is not , of ' course , all there is to comprehension, but it reflects one important aspect of the comprehension process, namely, the specification of who did what to whom. Case role assignment is not at all a trivial matter either, as we can see by considering some sentences and the case roles we assign to their constituents. We begin with several sentences using the verb break: (I) The boy broke the window. (2) The rock broke the window. (3) The window broke. (4) The boy broke the window with the rock. (5) The boy broke the window with the curtain. We can see that the assignment of case roles here is quite complex. The first noun phrase (NP) of the sentence can be the Agent (Sen- tences 1 , 4, and 5), the Instrument (Sentence 2), or the Patient 19. SENTENCE PROCESSING 273 (Sentence 3). The NP in the prepositional phrase (PP) could' be the Instrument (Sentence 4), or it could be a Modifier of the second NP as it is in at least one reading of Sentence 5. Another example again brings out the ambiguity of the role assignment of with-NPs: (6) The boy ate the pasta with the sauce.
    [Show full text]
  • Subsymbolic Case-Role Analysis of Sentences with Embedded Clauses Y
    Subsymb olic Case-Role Analysis of y Sentences with Emb edded Clauses Risto Miikkulainen The UniversityofTexas at Austin Abstract A distributed neural network mo del called SPEC for pro cessing sentences with recursive relative clauses is describ ed. The mo del is based on separating the tasks of segmenting the input word sequence into clauses, forming the case-role representations, and keeping track of the recursive emb eddings into di erent mo dules. The system needs to b e trained only with the basic sentence constructs, and it generalizes not only to new instances of familiar relative clause structures, but to novel structures as well. SPEC exhibits plausible memory degradation as the depth of the center emb eddings increases, its memory is primed by earlier constituents, and its p erformance is aided by semantic constraints b etween the constituents. The ability to pro cess structure is largely due to a central executive network that monitors and controls the execution of the entire system. This way, in contrast to earlier subsymb olic systems, parsing is mo deled as a controlled high-level pro cess rather than one based on automatic re ex resp onses. 1 Intro duction Reading an input sentence into an internal representation is a most fundamental task in natural language pro cessing. Dep ending on the eld of study and the goals involved, it has several alterna- tive formulations. In Arti cial Intelligence, parsing a sentence usually means mapping a sequence of word representations into a shallow semantic interpretation, such as the case-role assignment of the constituents.
    [Show full text]
  • The Rise of Non-Canonical Subjects and Semantic Alignments in Hindi Annie Montaut
    The rise of non-canonical subjects and semantic alignments in Hindi Annie Montaut To cite this version: Annie Montaut. The rise of non-canonical subjects and semantic alignments in Hindi. Studies in Language Companion Series, 2013, 140 (1), pp.91-117. halshs-00962420 HAL Id: halshs-00962420 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00962420 Submitted on 21 Mar 2014 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Annie MONTAUT INALCO/CNRS-SeDyL The rise of non-canonical subjects and semantic alignments in Hindi Abstract An inquiry into the emergence of non-canonical subjects in Hindi may be a first step in evaluating the importance of semantic alignments in the language. The modern data display a cline of subject properties depending on the case and semantic role (section 1). A brief account of the ancient data in Sanskrit (section 2) shows that the most innovative development was that of experiencer subjects, which emerged in early NIA along with inefficient and involuntary actors (section 3). This raise was related to global systemic changes in the language, particularly the development of new case markers (section 4). The last section examines the main factors responsible for this shift, particularly re-analysis, usage and speaker’s viewpoint, lexical renewal and contact.
    [Show full text]
  • 5.2 Clause and Noun Host Type (CNH-Type) Constructions
    UC Berkeley Dissertations, Department of Linguistics Title Grammar and Semantics of Adnominal Clauses in Japanese Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/81h604rt Author Matsumoto, Yoshiko Publication Date 1989 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Grammar and Semantics of Adnominal Clauses in Japanese By Yoshiko Matsumoto MA. (University of Tsukuba, Japan) 1979 M A (University of California) 1982 CJPhil. (University of California) 1987 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LINGUISTICS in the GRADUATE DIVISION of the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA at BERKELEY Approved: DOCTORAL DEGREE CONFERRED ********* illfii **6at**bi»etM*********** Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Grammar and Semantics of Adnominal Clauses in Japanese Copyright ©1988 Yoshiko Matsumoto Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Grammar and Semantics of Adnominal Clauses in Japanese by Yoshiko Matsumoto A bstract One crucial but rarely emphasized characteristic of Japanese noun modification by adnominal clause (e.g. relative clauses, noun complement clauses) is that the semantic function of the head noun with respect to the predicate in the modifying clause is not explicitly indicated. Despite the difficulties that this creates for any purely syntactic or structural analysis, the role of semantics and pragmatics has received little attention. This study focuses on the construal of Japanese adnominal clauses, and has as purpose (1) to demonstrate that a purely syntactic analysis modelled on analyses of English relative clauses cannot account for Japanese Noun-Modifying Construc­ tions (NMCs), (2) to show that semantics and pragmatics play a crucial role in the construal of clausal NMCs in Japanese, and (3) to suggest a framework that can account for a wide range of naturally-occurring NMCs.
    [Show full text]
  • The Evolution of Case Grammar
    The evolution of case grammar Remi van Trijp language Computational Models of Language science press Evolution 4 Computational Models of Language Evolution Editors: Luc Steels, Remi van Trijp In this series: 1. Steels, Luc. The Talking Heads Experiment: Origins of words and meanings. 2. Vogt, Paul. How mobile robots can self-organize a vocabulary. 3. Bleys, Joris. Language strategies for the domain of colour. 4. van Trijp, Remi. The evolution of case grammar. 5. Spranger, Michael. The evolution of grounded spatial language. ISSN: 2364-7809 The evolution of case grammar Remi van Trijp language science press Remi van Trijp. 2017. The evolution of case grammar (Computational Models of Language Evolution 4). Berlin: Language Science Press. This title can be downloaded at: http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/52 © 2017, Remi van Trijp Published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence (CC BY 4.0): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ISBN: 978-3-944675-45-9 (Digital) 978-3-944675-84-8 (Hardcover) 978-3-944675-85-5 (Softcover) ISSN: 2364-7809 DOI:10.17169/langsci.b52.182 Cover and concept of design: Ulrike Harbort Typesetting: Sebastian Nordhoff, Felix Kopecky, Remi van Trijp Proofreading: Benjamin Brosig, Marijana Janjic, Felix Kopecky Fonts: Linux Libertine, Arimo, DejaVu Sans Mono Typesetting software:Ǝ X LATEX Language Science Press Habelschwerdter Allee 45 14195 Berlin, Germany langsci-press.org Storage and cataloguing done by FU Berlin Language Science Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
    [Show full text]
  • Case Assignment in Tamil
    CASE ASSIGNMENT IN TAMIL Dr. K. Umaraj Lakshmi Pathipakam 374, V.G.R. Puram Alagesan Road, Coimbatore, India Dr. K. Umaraj Case Assignment in Tamil Case Assignment in Tamil Dr. K.Umaraj @ Author First published in : 2007 Page : 92 Size : Demy Copies : 1000 Publishers Lakshmi Pathipakam 374, V.G.R. Puram Alagesan Road Coimbatore Road India Price : 100.00 Printed by THE PARKAR 293, Ahemed Comples, 2 nd Floor Royapettah High Road Chennai – 600 014 Phone : 044 - 65904058 Dr. K. Umaraj Case Assignment in Tamil Dedicated to : MY PARENTS, WIFE AND CHILDERN’S Dr. K. Umaraj Case Assignment in Tamil CONTENT Preface Forward Introduction 9 G B Theory 32 Nominative Case Assignment 52 Objective and Dative Case Assignment 57 Genitive Case Assignment 65 Case and Empty Category pro 69 Conclusion 78 Bibliography 81 Dr. K. Umaraj Case Assignment in Tamil 1. INTRODUCTION 1.11.11.1 Case Case is grammatical category which indicates the syntactic and semantic relationship existing between a noun and a verb or a noun and a noun in a sentence. In Tamil grammatical tradition, the word vēṟṟumai ‘difference’ is used as a technical term to refer to case. According to Tamil grammarians, case differentiates the relationships found between a noun and a verb or a noun and another noun in a sentence and it changes the function of the noun in the syntactic structure or a sentence. The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) descries case as follows: “In inflected languages, one of the varied forms of a substantive adjective or pronoun, which expresses the varied relations in which it may stand to some other word in a sentence (e.g.) a subject or a sub object or a verb, attribute to another ‘noun, object of preposition, etc”.
    [Show full text]
  • Possession and Partition: the Two Genitives of English* Anatol Stefanowitsch, Hamburg
    Possession and Partition: The Two Genitives of English* Anatol Stefanowitsch, Hamburg 0 Introduction It is the aim of this paper1 to investigate the semantics and the distribution of two constructions of English, both of which are traditionally considered to be genitives. The first of these is the so-called s-genitive (or possessive), which consists of a nominal marked by the genitive suffix (the modifier), followed by another nominal which it modifies (the head): NP-’s-N. Together, these two nominals are generally considered to form another noun phrase (but the syntactic structure of the constructions will not concern us in this paper). The second construction—referred to as of-genitive (or of–construction)—consists of a nominal (the head) followed by a prepositional phrase with of which modifies it (the NP in this prepositional phrase is the modifier): (Article)-N-of-NP. Together with an optional article, the nominal and the prepositional phrase are, again, considered to form a noun phrase. Some typical instances of the s– and the of–genitive may serve to clarify exactly which aspects of the semantics and the distribution of these two constructions will be investigated in this paper. Examples of the s–genitive are shown in (3), examples of the of–genitive in (4): (3) the teacher’s car, John’s leg, Shakespeare’s plays, Mary’s intelligence, the children’s arrival, the dean’s appointment (4) a piece of apple pie, a dress of silk, the plays of Shakespeare, the beauty of the desert, the arrival of the children, the appointment of the dean These examples demonstrate two things: First, each of the two constructions can encode a wide range of semantic relations: in the expressions in (3), the s–genitive encodes (in that order) possession, body parts, authorship, attributes, someone performing an action, and someone affected by an action; in the expressions in (4), the of–genitive encodes partition, the material of which something consists, authorship, attributes, someone performing an action, and someone affected by an action.
    [Show full text]
  • The Case System of Tagalog Verbs
    PACIFIC LINGUISTICS Senie� B - No. 21 THE CASE SYSTEM OF TAGALOG VERBS by Teresita V. Ramos Department of Linguistics Research School of Pacific Studies THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY Ramos, T.V. The case system of Tagalog verbs. B-27, viii + 178 pages. Pacific Linguistics, The Australian National University, 1974. DOI:10.15144/PL-B27.cover ©1974 Pacific Linguistics and/or the author(s). Online edition licensed 2015 CC BY-SA 4.0, with permission of PL. A sealang.net/CRCL initiative. -------------------------------- PACIFIC LINGUISTICS is published by the Ling ui��ie CiAeie 06 CanbeAAa and consists of four series: SERIES A - OCCASI ONAL PAPERS SERIES B - MONOGRAPHS SERIES C - BOOKS SERIES V - SPECIAL PUBLICATIONS . ED ITOR: S.A. Wurm . ASSOCIATE EDITORS : D.C. Laycock , C.L. Voorhoeve. ALL CORRESPONDENCE concerning PACIFIC LINGUISTICS, including orders and su bscriptions, should be addressed to: The Secretary , PACIFIC LINGUISTICS, Department of Linguistics , School of Pacific Studies , The Australian National University , Canberra , A. C.T. 2600. Australia. Copyright (§) Teresita V. Ramos. First published 1974. The editors are indebted to the Australian National University for help in the production of this series. ' This publication was made possible by an initial grant from the Hunter Douglas Fund. National Library of Australia card number and ISBN 0 85883 115 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT vi LIST OF TERMS AND ABBREVIATIONS viii CH APTER I. INTRODUCTION 1 1.1. The Tagalog Language 1 1. 2. Tagalog Linguistic Studies 1 1. 3. Theoretical Orientation 3 CHAPTER II. TAGALOG DEEP STRUCTURE CASES 15 2.1. The Use of Case in Philippine Studies 15 2.2.
    [Show full text]
  • F Or T R E S U M E S
    R E F OR T R E S U M E S ED 019 631 AL ODD 413 THE CASE FOR CASE. BY- FILLMORE, CHARLES J. PUB DATE APR 67 ECRS PRICEMF-$0.75 HC-$5.48 135P. DESCRIPTORS- *LANGUAGE UNIVERSALS;*GRAMMAR, *DEEP STRUCTURE) *SURFACE STRUCTURE, LINGUISTICTHEORY, LANGUAGE TYPOLOGY: PHRASE STRUCTURE, TRANSFORMATIONTHEORY (LANGUAGE), TRANSFORMATION GENERATIVE GRAMMAR,NOMINALS, CASE, BASE COMPONENT, IN THIS PAPER, PREPARED FOR THEAPRIL 1967 TEXAS SYMPOSIUM ON LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS,IT IS PROPOSED THAT THE GRAMMATICAL NOTION "CASE" DESERVESA PLACE IN THE BASE COMPONENT OF THE GRAMMAR OF EVERYLANGUAGE. IT IS ARGUED THAT PAST RESEARCH HAS NOT LED TOVALID INSIGHTS ON CASE RELATIONSHIPS AND THAT WHAT IS NEEDEDIS A CONCEPTION OF BASE STRUCTURE IN WHICH CASE RELATIONSHIPSARE PRIMITIVE TERMS OF THE THEORY AND IN WHICH SUCHCONCEPTS AS "SUBJECT" AND "DIRECT OBJECT" ARE MISSING. THELATTER ARE REGARDED AS PROPER ONLY TO THE SURFACE STRUCTUREOF SOME (BUT POSSIBLY NOT ALL). LANGUAGES. BASIC TOTHESE ARGUMENTS ARE TWO ASSUMPTIONS NOW TAKEN FOR GRANTED BYGENERATIVE GRAMMARIANS--(1) THE CENTRALITY OF SYNTAX,AND (2) THE IMPORTANCE OF COVERT CATEGORIES. THEAUTHOR PROPOSES "THAT THERE ARE MANY SEMANTICALLY RELEVANTSYNTACTIC REALTIONSHIFS INVOLVING NOUNS AND THE STRUCTURESTHAT CONTAIN THEM, THAT THESE RELATIONSHIPS ARE IN LARGEFART COVERT BUT ARE NEVERTHELESS EMPIRICALLY DISCOVERABLE,THAT THEY FORM A SPECIFIC FINITE SET, AND THATOBSERVATIONS MADE ABOUT THEM WILL TURN OUT TO HAVE CONSIDERABLECROSS-LINGUISTIC VALIDITY." HE REFERS TO THESEAS "CASE" RELATIONSHIPS AND THE GRAMMAR PROPOSED AND OUTLINED HEREIS "CASE GRAMMAR." THE SUBSTANTIVE MODIFICATION TO THETHEORY OF TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR WHICH HE PROPOSES AMOUNTS TOA REINTRODUCTION OF THE "CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK" INTERPRETATIONOF CASE SYSTEMS BUT WITH A CLEARER UNDERSTANDING OF THEDIFFERENCE BETWEEN DEEP AND SURFACE STRUCTURE.
    [Show full text]
  • WPL 10 August 1971 245.Pdf
    Some Problems for Case Gram.mar* Charles J. Fillmore The Ohio State University and The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences 1. Several years ago~ from this platform, I presented n paper with the title "A proposal concerning English prepositions, 11 (Fillmore, 1966). That was the first public exposure of a.n effort that a few montl-is later resulted in a longish paper called "The case for caset 11 (Fill.more, 1968). I suggested in these pe.pers that a. new order of concepts should be incorporated into the theory of transformational grammar; I spoke of deep structure cases; and my hope was that their existence could be discovered and justified by syntactic criteria and that their presence in underlying representations of sentences would have the effect of reducinp the burden of the semantic inter- pretation component of a grammar. In spite of an over-exuberant f'ina.l section in "The case for case," I thought of' my work, not as a proposal to eliminate deep structures altogether~ but as an effort to find a level of syntactic structure which wa.s deeper than that offered by the then standard theory. My position was what would now be called deep structure interEretivist; and since my efforts were largely directed toward the classification of lexical items and the at.i.alysis of complement patterns of ordini:try verbs and a.dJ ectives, it was of the sort that today would be called lexicalist. In his chapter on ttResidual p:roblems" nea.:r the end of Aspects of the Theor~· o:f Syntax~ (Chomsky~ 1965) Chomsky reminds us of the failure of the theory presented in that book to deal with the fact that 11 in some unclear sense" the:re is something in common betveen the [meJ of [John strikes me as pompous, J and the [IJ of (I regard John as pompoua.J.
    [Show full text]
  • 28. Construction Grammar
    974 IV. Syntactic Models 28. Construction Grammar 1. Introduction 2. Basic notions 3. Notational conventions 4. Explanatory potential beyond traditional syntactic analyses 5. Concluding remarks 6. References (selected) Abstract The article presents an overview of the fundamental features that characterize Construc- tion Grammar as a distinct approach to linguistic analysis. The central notion is that of a construction, defined as a theoretical entity and the basic unit of analysis, which allows for both the holistic view of linguistic patterning and for analyzing the internal properties of larger patterns. The article discusses the theory’s conceptual underpinnings, illus- trates the basics of its representational apparatus, and provides a brief demonstration of the ways in which a constructional analysis can be carried out. The constructional approach is shown to be now expanding into several areas beyond its original aim (syntactic description), including language change, typology, acquisition, and corpus and computational applications. 1. Introduction 1.1. Conceptual underpinnings Construction Grammar (CxG) is a theoretical approach in which generalizations about linguistic structure are formulated in terms of constructions, i.e., conventionalized clus- ters of features (syntactic, prosodic, pragmatic, semantic, textual, etc.) that recur as fur- ther indivisible associations between form and meaning (meaning is broadly understood, see below). The constructional approach developed out of a confluence of interests − linguistic, cognitive, anthropological, philosophical, computational − which all revolved around the idea that linguistic form is inextricably bound with its meaning and its com- municative function and that this connection must be the basis for any descriptively and explanatorily adequate theory of linguistic structure. The conceptual origins of CxG can be traced most directly to Fillmore’s Case Grammar, a case-role based approach to syn- tactic analysis, laid out in Fillmore’s (1968) seminal paper.
    [Show full text]