File Information
File: 05-lr/acl_arc_1_sum/cleansed_text/xml_by_section/abstr/90/c90-3056_abstr.xml
Size: 15,202 bytes
Last Modified: 2025-10-06 13:46:58
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?> <Paper uid="C90-3056"> <Title>SYNTACTIC DESCRIPTION OF FREE WORD ORDER LANGUAGES</Title> <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr"> <SectionTitle> SYNTACTIC DESCRIPTION OF FREE WORD ORDER LANGUAGES </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> A framework for the description of syntactic structures of free word order languages is proposed, based on combination of intuitions underlying immediate constituent description, dependency description and communicative dynamism. The combined approach is compared to its sources and shown superior in descriptive power, esp. in the area of free intermixing of (any number of) adjuncts with complements and in coordination. Close resemblance to two other recent approaches is pointed out.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> I. Syz~tactic Structures for Free Word Order The absolute majority of current linguistic frameworks characterize syntactic structures of natural languages in predominantly static terms, paying only minimal or no attel~tion to the communicative function ef language and its reflection in the process of utterlng/understandlng (generation/parsing) sentences. null In the case of generative frameworks based on i~nedlate constituent approaches to .language descr~ptlon, this can be ascribed (at least partly) to the fact that many of them (GB, LFG, GPSG, TAGS, to mention the most widespread ones) were created primarlly for the sake of description of English, a highly configuratlonal language in which the impact of communicative functions on syntactic structure is quite limited (at least in comparison with the so-ca!led free-word-order languages - henceforth FWOLs). The frameworks based on the dependency syntax (e.g., the &quot;Meaning-Text&quot; model of Mel'chuk and Apresyan, the &quot;Functional Generative Description&quot; of Sgall et al., the &quot;Word Grammar&quot; of Hudson), on the other hand, by the very principle separate linguistic structures from the process of generation/parsing so sharply that even if any reflection of the communicative process is present in the generation/parsing procedures, it gets lost in the resulting structures and has to be added there (if needed) more or \]ess artificially, e.g., in the form of different indices (cf. the structures in Sgall et el, 1986).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> This lack of reflection of communicative aspects of language in the (syntactic) structures, together with still other features of the abovementioned frameworks (such as, for the immediate constituent based approaches, the incapability of the standard &quot;S --> NP VP&quot; approach to describe, e.g., the +'Object-Subject-Verb&quot; constltuent order, or this obstacle overcome in some way, the problems connected with free intermixing of any number of free adjuncts among the complements, and, for the dependency based approaches, the problems involved in capturing even quite simple instances of coordination), make relatively profound adjustments in the existing frameworks or development of a new one a necessary and highly important task if a language involving broad impact of the communicative aspects on its syntactic structures (such as the FWOLs) has to be described formally in such a way that the description can be directly implemented on a computer and function as a generator or a parser.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> The easiest way how to overcome the difficultles connected with the current frameworks and to achieve the abovementioned goal of creating a framework suitable for a reasonable description of FWOLs as well as for an easy and efficient computer implementation seemed to be to augment the immediate eonstltuent based nontransformatlonal approaches (which are easier to implement due to the clearcut correspondence between the rules of the grammar and the structures they generate) with tile intultions contained in more traditional descriptions of the FWOLs as well as in the descriptions of functional sentence perspective and com~ municatlve dynamism (Firhas,1971,1975; Sga!l et ai,1973).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="4"> In the unmarked case, the scale of co~nunicative dynamism allows for splitting the sentence or arty of its parts on the level of the &quot;main&quot; constituel\]ts (such as Subject, Object, different verbal Adjuncts etc.) at any moment into two parts, the first con+ sisting of the constituent being processes (uttered, expanded) at the very moment, i+e. the currently least dynamic constituent, and the second one consisting of the &quot;rest&quot; of the sentence, i.e. of all the consti~ tuents more dynamic than the currently processed one.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="5"> This results in a non-transformational accounc of syntactic structures, in the form of binary right-branching trees (if the division sketched above is broadened to all constituent types used in the description). Art example of the structure for the notorious sentence &quot;John loves Mary&quot; is given in (I). (Mind the rightmost &quot;Rest S&quot; nonterminal dominating an empty string: &quot;nothing more is to&quot; be uttered&quot; in the sentence, &quot;nothing is more dynamic&quot; than &quot;Mary&quot;.) On such an approach, both the generation of all possible constituent orders and free intermixing of any number of adjuncts between any two complements is guaranteed for FWOLs, and this without ~slng the Kleene star in the rules, metaru\]es generating an infinite number of rules or any other way o~ using (explicitly or implicitly) an infinite rule set. Just on the contrary, the approach results in a drastic simplification of the number and shape of rules needed: one gross rule scheme (2) is sufficient for the whole grammar: (2) ~~at is to be 1 \[be expandedJ lexpanded NO~A In this scheme, the second constituent on the right hand side is always the phrasal head; accozding to the nature of the left daughter, the rule set can be further factorized into the following subsets reflecting the classical linguistic wisdom: ru\]es expanding the lexical head, rules expanding a complement, rules expanding a free adjunct, rules expandi~g an extraposed constituent, rules expanding a member of a coordinated structure, rules expanding minor categories (conjunctions, particles etc.}. Such a division is im-</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="7"> portan5 not only because it brings along some more purity and perspicuity, but also because it allows for a straightforward implementation of different feature inheritance principles of the framework (such as the Head Feature Principle, Subcategorization Principle etc.) in the computer variant of the grammar; on a reasonable formal notation of the grammar rules allowing marking off the type of the rule as the property of the rule itself, it is possible to bound the application of the principles to the whole rule types rather than to each rule separately, as the case often is in many current parsers (e.g., for a head daughter in a rule, it is not necessary to stipulate explicitly the sharing of its head features with the mother, since this is provided for by listing the rule in the class of headexpanding rules).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="8"> 2. Relation to other Syntactic Frameworks The proposed structures might seem rather unconventional at first glance; however, their relation to structures used in more usual syntactic frameworks can be shown to be quite straightforward in simple cases. All what is needed to obtain dependency trees is to factorize the set of nodes of the described structures by all bar projections of a single terminal node. An X-structure can be obtained by factorizing the set of nodes by projections of the same bar~level of a single terminal node.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="9"> In more complicated cases, however, the factorizations sketched above cannot be performed.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="10"> Exactly in these cases, the structures proposed rank better in describing at least the following phenomena of FWOLs: in relation to dependency syntax (traditionally used for description of FWOLs), first of all in describing coordination, but also the so-called non-proJectlve constructions (e.g., unbounded dependencies) as well as cases where contact position of certain words or constituents is required or positions are to be strictly fixed even in FWOLs (e.g., the WackernaGel's position of clitlcs), which both is difficult to achieve in dependency descriptions if non-projective constructions are allowed to occur since these ~nterfere with the &quot;basic&quot; projective ordering generated null - in relation to standard variants of X-syntax, the approach adopted solves the problems with the position of subject, with free intermixing of complements and adjuncts and, in addition, it is able to cope with certain cases of &quot;heavy&quot; coordination (see below) on a context-free basis.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="11"> 3. suboategorization and Coomdinatlon Generally speaking, the intuitions (as opposed to the formalism) standing behind the framework are very close to (if not the same as) those supporting dependency approaches (certainly more so than to the intultions of the majority of current immediate constituent approaches, cf., e.g., the nonexistence of the &quot;NP/VP&quot; division of a sentence), but the structures developed for the formal incarnation of these intuitions have by far more descriptive power than the standard formalizations proposed for the dependency approaches. This extra power (even in comparison with the standard X-approaches) stems mainly from the increased number of nonterminal symbols: the greater number of nonterminals allows for a more subtle structullng of the terminal string.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="12"> The crucial point of this refinement of structural information is the one concerning sub-categorization of phrases. In accordance with the treatment of subcategorization in HPSG and other frameworksr subcategorization can be informally viewed as the number and shape of constituents to be added to a particular phrase for it to become a saturated projection of its lexical head (e.g., for a VP, this subcategorizatlon is the number and shape of constituents to be added for the VP to become a sentence; thus, a sentence is Just an alias for a VP with empty subcategorization). In the example (3), it is important to notice the &quot;sharing&quot; of the subcategorizatlon requirements (depicted schematically as sets of subcategorlzed-for elements associated with the nonterminal nodes of the structure) between the lexlcal head of the sentence (the verb) and its rlghtmost phrasal projection, as well as the stepwlse right-to-left reduction of the subcategorization requirements of the VP's, and also the fact that the expansion of a lexicol head or a free adjunct does not affect the subca-</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="14"> As mentioned above, this &quot;extra descriptive power&quot; can be made use of for descriptlon of (among other) certain &quot;heavy&quot; coordinations. The instances we have in mind are &quot;Right Node Raising&quot; and &quot;Across the Board&quot; coordinations exemplified in (4) and (5), respectively.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="15"> (4) Mary baked and John ate an apple pie.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="16"> (5) the pie Mary baked and John ate Before presenting the treatment proper, two matters have to be pointed out: - first, in FWOLs &quot;Right Node Raising&quot; and &quot;Across the Board&quot; are exactly the same cases of coordinative constructions (due to the free-word-order, the position of the &quot;extracted&quot; constituent plays no syntactic role) - second, the grammaticality of other cases of coordination can be order dependent, even in FWOLs: typical case is &quot;Gapping&quot; (of. the contrast shown for English in (6)a,b but holding also in (at least) Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, Russian and Slovak), somewhat unclear is the situation with &quot;Non-Constituent Coordination&quot;, where speakers of the sbovementioned !anguages seem to have different opinions about the grammaticality of the respective counterparts of (7)b. (6) a. John loves Mary and Jim Sue.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="17"> b. * Jim Sue and John loves Mary.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="18"> (7) a. John gave a book to Mary and a bunch of flowers to Sue.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="19"> b. ?? A book to Mary and a bunch of flowers to Sue John gave.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="20"> This corroborates the view that (6)a,(7)a are instances of some extragrammatlcal communicative processes (i.e. processes not reflected in the grammar of the language - such as the tendency to avoid uttering identical parts of coordinated structures etc.) rather than true cases of &quot;coordinated predication&quot; which seems to be the case with &quot;Right Node Raising&quot; and &quot;Across the Board&quot;.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="21"> The treatment of &quot;Right Node Raising&quot; and &quot;Across the Board&quot; relies fully on the refinement of subcategorization into the increased number of nodes of the structure, but on the other hand it does not require any augmentation of the coordination mechanisms of the framework, the only coordination rule being the &quot;coordination of likes&quot;. The approach even allows for description of constructions where &quot;Right Node Raising&quot; and &quot;Across the Board&quot; cooccur. The structure assigned to such cases is given in (8) (the terminal string of which is quite probably no good English, but translations into the FWOLs tested are considered fully acceptable).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="22"> i ought and later {lave / ~ VP yesterday to Sue ~ ~ { SUBJ, OBJ} some app\] es Note that the term &quot;\]exica\] head&quot; should be taken with a grain of salt for the VP in (8) {as well as for all {)(her coordinative constructions) - this is, hog, ever, a purely termirlologlca\] matter which can be coped with easily in a ful\]f\]edged exposition of the theory and i~as no bearing on its validity. Similarly, for coordiiIatJons eons\[stieg of more than two members, the exemplifJed construction would not conforw to the scheme Item (2); this Js again due. to simplifications adopt()(\] let the p~rpose of the e~rrent preseniatlon, and \]n a i~ore detai led uxposJ tion coordinative constructions would be al~.o expanded in th~. &quot;one-member-C/~t-a-time&quot; \[\[l,lnne r.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="23"> it talght be also interesting to observe that &quot;Gapping&quot; and &quot;Non-Constituent Coordination&quot; cannot be treated in the framework, unless it is augmented with :ome &quot;deletiun&quot; processes operating on \[:he structures <)enerated by the context-free base.</Paragraph> </Section> class="xml-element"></Paper>