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<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?> <Paper uid="J81-2003"> <Title>The Meaning of OF and HAVE in the USL System</Title> <Section position="5" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> 3. The Interpretation of HAVE </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> Compared with the extensive discussion of the verb BE, which is accorded special treatment both in linguistics and logic, the verb HAVE does not seem to have appeared in any way problematic. Syntactic peculiarities have been observed -- a transitive verb which does not readily admit the passive -- and a wide range of meanings are given in any dictionary, many of them idiomatic. For sentence analysis within a data base context, the major question is that of where to store information contained in sentences with HAVE as the main verb and from where to retrieve it.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> In the interpretation found in Cresswell (1973) or Bennet's (1974) extension of Montague, HAVE appears as a two-place predicate.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> This interpretation is also widely accepted in artificial intelligence. BUt, as we are going to show, the interpretation leads to incorrect results and should be abandoned.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> HAVE as a two-place predicate in a relational data base would have to be set up as a relation HAVE with two columns, one for the subject, one for the objects of HAVE-sentences. The tuples of the relation would contain the individuals (names, part numbers, figures) among which the relation HAVE holds. However, a closer look at the contents of such a relation shows that two places, one for the subject and one for the object, are not enough. Given the facts that: John has a secretary by the name of Pauline John has a daughter named Polly, who is a secretary The corresponding data base entries in the relations HAVE, DAUGHTER, and SECRETARY would read:</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="6" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> HAVE DAUGHTER SECRETARY NOM ACC NOM OF NOM OF </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"/> <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section"> <SectionTitle> John Polly Polly John Polly Bill John Pauline Pauline John </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> From this would follow correctly that &quot;John has (daughter) Polly&quot; and &quot;John has (secretary) Pauline&quot; but also that &quot;John has two secretaries&quot;, because both Polly and Pauline are secretaries. The relationship between elements expressed as &quot;x has y&quot; is too vague; it can apply in too many cases, and can often be reversed &quot;if x has (daughter) y, then y has (parent) x&quot;; so that at least the specific relationship that makes it possible to speak of x having y would have to be recorded in a third column: &quot;x has y as z&quot;. In that case, the examples above would not lead to John's having two secretaries: What is written in the third column sometimes appears overtly in sentences, but it is not part of the valence of HAVE, so that it would be difficult to require HAVE to be used only with reference to the relationship in the third column. Furthermore, the fact that the items in the third column are names of relationships and not names of individuals is significant in itself. This leads to the conclusion that HAVE should not be regarded as a primitive predicate at all, but as a derived predicate, derivable just in case some other American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 7, Number 2, April-June 1981 111 Magdalena Zoeppritz The Meaning of OF and HAVE in the USL-System relationship exists between the individuals in question.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> With different aims and from a different point of view, this has already been observed by Bach (1967:476-77): It has often been said that be has no meaning by itself but only in connection with Predicate, the passive construction, and so on. The same is true of have. The two forms are distinguished syntactically from most true verbs by the fact that they have no selectional restrictions in themselves, but occur in constructions where the selections reach across from &quot;subject&quot; to &quot;object&quot; or complement. Likewise, from a semantic point of view, their contribution tO the meaning of the sentence is determined completely by the items that they link.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> Conversely, HAVE can only be used meaningfully to link elements where some other relationship determining the nature of that link is expressed or can be inferred. The vague term &quot;some other relationship&quot; needs more clarification than can be given at this time.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> It is clear that the relationship must be representable as a two-place predicate, but many such predicates do not serve as the basis for deriving HAVE. It seems, for instance, that the relations expressed by action verbs do not permit HAVE to be derived directly, though their agent nominalizations often do: John teaches Jack * # John has Jack # Jack has John John is the teacher of Jack = Jack has John as his teacher The relationships most often associated with HAVE are those of possession and ownership. That the meaning of HAVE is much wider is commonplace. (A detailed analysis of the syntactic properties of HAVE and their association with different meanings is found in Pitha 1971 and 1972). Still, the verbs OWN and POSSESS can be replaced by HAVE without intervening nominalization and the extension of John has a bicycle from John owns a bicycle to John has a bicycle in his possession seems artificial. On the other hand, the conclusion: If John has a bicycle, then he owns a bicycle is plausible and often true, but not necessarily so, and will be false with different choices of objects. In the case of inalienable possession as the objects of HAVE sentences, the conclusion is absurd, so that the objects of HAVE and OWN are taken to refer to different entities (Bierwisch, 1965). Nevertheless, while it is clearly impossible to restrict the interpretation of HAVE to possession, any other interpretation will face the problem that HAVE is often used as a synonym of OWN or POSSESS (cf. section 6). This may be the reason why HAVE is often regarded as a primitive for possession (e.g. Langacker, 1975). There is a transformational relationship between HAVE and OF, already discussed e.g. in Bach (1967): Peter has a daughter Joan Joan is the daughter of Peter But there is a peculiarity: Whereas HAVE can be used with names, as well as with names and common nouns, whereby a relationship is implied if if is not overtly expressed (e.g., We each have our own room, I have A101), OF is rarely used only with names: Peter has A202 ?(The) A202 of Peter but Peter has a room The room of Peter This seems to show that, unlike HAVE-sentences, OF-phrases are acceptable only where the relationship between individuals is not implied but overtly stated. There is no base relationship underlying the use of OF, the base relationship is the one preceding OF in the OF-phrase. Furthermore, OF-phrases seem to be the specific means to express such relationships. The &quot;secretary of Peter&quot; is the individual which is related to Peter via the relationship &quot;secretary of&quot;. OF-phrases cannot be expanded in the same way as HAVE-sentences can be expanded by AS-complements to introduce the &quot;real&quot; base relationship. And, because the base relationship is overtly stated, OF-phrases cannot be reversed: ?(The) Peter of the secretary In this sense, OF-phrases can be considered as being more explicit than the HAVE-sentences into which they can be transformed.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="4"> This led to the decision to interpret HAVE sentences in USL as transformations of OF-phrases and consequently to search or store information in HAVE-sentences not in a relation representing the verb, but in the columns with the role-name OF in relations addressed by the nouns in the sentence.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="5"> The following uses of OF are not transformationally related to HAVE and are excluded here: Helen of Troy piece of chalk distance of 3 miles love of God angel of a nurse the destruction of the city basket (full/out) of wood man of property For the purposes of data base query, some of these constructions with OF do not seem to be necessary. Measure expressions are desirable, but have not been implemented. An unsolved problem is how OF-phrases resulting from nominalizations of verbs can be related within the USL framework in a general way to 112 American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 7, Number 2, April-June 1981 Magdalena Zoeppritz The Meaning of OF and HAVE in the USL-System the verb or to the event referred to. The remaining uses of OF have a range of meaning similar to HAVE in expressing not only possession and part-of relationships, but also any number of other relationships which, in the case of OF, are explicitly named by the noun preceding OF and, in the case of HAVE, can be inferred from the nouns or occur explicitly in the AScomplement. null All uses where OF is related to HAVE, as well as some of the other uses, can in German also be expressed by genitive attributes (not all are possible in English because of the restricted use of the genitive). The uses related to HAVE also appear as possessive pronouns. Genitive attributes, as well as possessive pronouns, are interpreted in the same way as OFphrases. An additional selection operation for possessive pronouns is necessary to obtain a match between the individual members of the sets referred to by the possessive and addressed by the head noun of the possessive.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="6"> If the transformational relationship between HAVE-sentences and OF-phrases is to be used, and HAVE-sentences access the OF-column of relations (the column with the role name OF), there are still two possibilities: Given the sentence: Which manager has a secretary? a first interpretation addresses the OF-column of MANAGER and compares the contents of that column with the list of secretaries: &quot;Is there a manager of somebody, is that somebody a secretary, and if so, who is the manager ' The set of x, such that x is a manager of y</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="8"> This interpretation is valid only where secretaries are managed by the people whose secretary they are, but fails for: Which manager has room 35? unless the room of the manager is also contained in the OF-column of MANAGER. In general, this interpretation will work only where everything a manager can have is contained in the OF-column of MANAGER and is therefore not useful as a general solution. Furthermore, the interpretation is unable to handle correctly sentences like: Which manager has a musician as his secretary? Which manager has a secretary as his musician? 1 It assigns the following interpretation to both sentences: null</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="10"> though their meaning is clearly different.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="11"> 1 The possessive pronoun here and in the examples below makes for better reading of the English glosses, the German examples do not have it and it is not necessary for the discussion. A second interpretation of the sentence below: Which manager has a secretary? searches in the OF-column of the accusative, SECRE-TARY, for an entry that is also listed in MANAGER: &quot;Is there a secretary of somebody, is that somebody a manager, and if so, who is it&quot;: The set of x such that there is a y who is a secretary and y is secretary of x and x is The set of x such that the room of x is 35 and x is a manager:</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="13"> The second solution does not require that everything a manager can have is found in the OF-column of manager. The selection starts with the relation named by the direct object of HAVE. In this way it is also guaranteed that the relation specified actually obtains between the respective individuals. In the example: Which manager has a secretary? the secretary requested is not just any secretary, but the secretary of this manager, not perhaps a colleague of this manager and the secretary of another.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="14"> This interpretation also distinguishes between the two sentences with AS-complements, whereby the complement takes the place of the accusative and the accusative is treated as an apposition to it.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="15"> Which manager has a musician as his secretary? The set of x such that y is secretary of x</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="17"> The first solution could be used as an escape if the other interpretation does not yield a result, but it leads to multiple interpretations with the same result for relations that are defined as converses of one another.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="18"> In other cases, this interpretation leads to. answers where the answer should be undefined: Which manager has 5000? (salary, personnel, or what) Which manager has A202? (room, car, personnel number) As a result, the second interpretation has been implemented in its strict form: There is generally no answer defined for queries in which the object of HAVE does not contain a relation. In human dialogue, such questions can often be answered because either it is clear that HAVE means POSSESS or BE PART OF, or American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 7, Number 2, April-June 1981 113 Magdalena Zoeppritz The Meaning of OF and HAVE in the USL-System because what corresponds to the relation appears from the context.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="19"> 4. Test of the Interpretation In order to see whether relating the subject of HAVE to the OF-column of the accusative of HAVE is a correct and general solution to the problem of interpreting HAVE, this interpretation was tried out with sentences containing HAVE and six types of noun phrases relevant in USL: names, quantified common nouns, common nouns preceded by interrogatives, relative pronouns, interrogative pronouns, and noun phrases with apposition, all both in subject and object positions. Coordinated noun phrases were not tested separately, because they are expanded into as many separate sentences as there are noun phrases in the coordination. Similarly, where there is no negation, common nouns preceded by quantifier or preceded by interrogative do not require different interpretations with respect to HAVE. Quantifiers trigger several transformation operations on the ISBL-string resulting from the translation (Ott, 1977), but the translation is the same. Interrogatives indicate which columns of the result are to figure in the answer. Appositions of the type &quot;secretary Moser&quot;, &quot;Moser as secretary&quot; (including AS-complements of HAVE) have been ineluded, because the first type furnishes a selection from the relation addressed, and the second type the relation itself.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="20"> The relevant features then are: name, noun, interrogative, referent of relative pronoun, and negation. The following section lists the test phrases for these cases, but not all their permutations. Also, appositions are not shown for relative clauses, for the sake of brevity. The list illustrates how the interpretation of HAVE outlined here is implemented in USL. For each case, the general ISBL expression which results from the interpretation of HAVE is formed. Then examples are formulated against a sample data base and translated into ISBL expressions according to the general schema, and the results of the data base operations triggered by the ISBL expression are shown, together with the columns taking part in the selection operations. The examples have been left in German, with glosses in English, because some of the constructions tested cannot be formulated in English in the same way.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="21"> The sample data base contains the following relations: null</Paragraph> </Section> </Section> <Section position="7" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> MANAGER SECRETARY MUSICIAN NOM OF NOM OF NOM </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> NOMnom NOM-column of the relation in the nominative OFnom OF-column of the relation in the nominative NOMacc NOM-column of the relation in the accusative OFacc OF-column of the relation in the accusative NOMapp NOM-column of the relation in the apposition OFapp OF-column of the relation in the apposition NOMwh NOM-eotumn of the relation with interrogative NOMrel NOM-column of the relation governing the reads as &quot;join the relations addressed by the nominative and accusative of HAVE, select those tuples where the NOM-column of the relation in the nominative equals the OF-column of the relation in the accusative, and project for printing the NOM-column of those relations where the noun phrases contain interrogatives.&quot; In terms of a question against the sample data base this means: Which manager has which secretary? NOM, the relation in the nominative, is MA for MAN-AGER, ACC is SECRETARY: MAxSEK. NOMnom is the NOM-column of MANAGER, OFace is the OF-column of SECRETARY, the relation in the accusative: NOMma=OFsek. Both nominative and accusative noun phrases contain interrogatives. Therefore the NOM-columns of both must be projected for output: deg/bNOMma,NOMsek.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> ((MAxSEK) ;NOMma = OFsek) % NOMma,NOMsek The following data base operations result from this string: join of the relations MANAGER and SECRE- null In the actual implementation, the select operation precedes the join for reasons of economy. The result is an equi-join, where only those tuples are joined where the equality requested by the select operator 114 American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 7, Number 2, April-June 1981 Magdalena Zoeppritz The Meaning of OF and HAVE in the USL-System exists. This join is shown for the test cases wherever it applies. Similarly, where only one relation is involved, the tuples resulting from the selection operation are shown, not the whole relation. The columns inspected for selection are shown in full. For the present example, the result of the equi-join is the tupie: null In the case of negation in wh-questions and relatiVe clauses, a set thus found is subtracted from the set to be projected, so that &quot;which manager does not have a secretary&quot; is interpreted as &quot;find the managers who have secretaries and subtract them from the set of managers, to get the managers who do not have secretaries&quot;. In yes/no questions, also, the positive case is searched in the data base, and the answer depends on whether the result is an empty set. So, &quot;does: Moser have no manager&quot; is interpreted as &quot;find the manager of Moser&quot;. If the resulting list is empty, there is no manager of Moser and the answer is YES, if it is not, the answer is NO. 2 The test cases are ordered as follows: A. No negation 1. Questions a. Two relations: subject and object are nouns b. Relation and interrogative pronoun: subject or object is an interrogative pronoun c. Relation and name: subject or object is a name d. Apposition, two relations, one in the nominative e. Apposition, two relations in the accusative f. Apposition, three relations g. Apposition, name in the accusative h. Apposition, name in the nominative i. Apposition and two interrogative pronouns the apposition belongs to one of the pronouns 2 DOCH was selected as the answer in GERMAN, because NO confuses those speakers who use NO to answer negated questions in the affirmative.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> 2. Relative clauses a. Two relations b. Relation and name B. Negation 1. Questions a. Two relations b. Relation and interrogative pronoun c. Relation and name d. Appositions 2. Relative clauses a. Two relations b. Relation and name For ease of reference, the actual test cases below are each preceded by their section headings according to the outline above.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> A.l.d. Apposition, two relations, one in the nominative General schema: ((NOMxAPP)) ;NOMnom = OFapp) % NOMwh only for appositions to the accusative The relation in the apposition takes the place of the relation in the accusative in the scheme for A.l.a. If one of the two relations is in the nominative, and the other in the apposition to the accusative, the formulation &quot;whom as&quot; is equivalent to &quot;which&quot;. Which manager has whom as a secretary? is equivalent to Which manager has which secretary? If the question begins with the accusative, there are two readings: one placing the apposition with the preceding nominative, and a second reading which places it with the accusative. This second reading is the preferred reading. Therefore, the examples Welcher Manager hat wen als Sekret~irin? Which manager has whom as his secretary? Wen hat welcher Manager als Sekret~irin? Whom does which manager have as his secretary? are all translated like: Welcher Manager hat welche Sekret~trin? Which manager has which secretary? A.l.e. Apposition, both relations in the accusative General schema: ((ACCxAPP) ;NOMacc= NOMapp) % OFapp,NOMwh Wer hat welehen Manager als Sekret~irin? Who has which manager as his secretary? Welchen Manager hat wer als Sekret~trin? Which manager does who have as his secretary? ( (Ma x SEK ) ;NOMma=Nomsek) %OFapp,NOMma There is no equality Stern Moser NONE FOUND so the join is empty Stern Mahle</Paragraph> <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section"> <SectionTitle> Meier </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> Wer hat Moser als Sekret~irin? Who has Moser as his secretary? The name and the apposition are permuted by the grammar, so that the input to the translation is the same as in the previous example.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> A.l.h. Apposition, name in the nominative General schema: (APP;OFapp=NOM) %NOMapp only for appositions to the accusative Wen hat Sauer als Sekret~irin? Whom does Sauer have as his secretary? In one reading of this sentence, &quot;as a secretary&quot; is II 11 read as apposition to Sauer , and the question cannot be answered. The second, preferred, reading of the sentence places the apposition with the accusative:</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section"> <SectionTitle> Kufer </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> Where the name is in the apposition, Wen hat die Sekret~irin Moser? Whom does the secretary Moser have? there is no second reading: the answer is not defined. A.l.i. Apposition and two interrogative pronouns General schema: (APP;NOMapp) deg/b NOMapp,OFapp only for appositions to the accusative Wer hat wen als Sekret~irin? Who has whom as his secretary? Wen hat wer als Manager? Whom does who have as his manager? Again, the first reading associates &quot;manager&quot; with the noun phrase preceding it, and there is no answer. The second reading places the apposition with &quot;wen&quot; and is translated like the previous example, though with different relations.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> B.l.b. Relation and interrogative pronoun Who does not have a secretary? The general schema would look like: (NOMwh-(ACC;OFacc) % NOMacc) But since the interrogative pronoun does not contain a relation, there is no set to subtract from. These questions cannot be answered in USL, because the set often implied by the context or the meaning of words is not known. The set is given by formulations like &quot;which x does not have y&quot;.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> B.I.c. Relation and name The accusative is not a relation; the answer is not defined.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> B.l.d. Appositions Wer hat die Sekretfirin Moser nicht? Who does not have the secretary Moser? Wer hat keine Sekret~rin Moser? Who has no secretary named Moser? These examples can be interpreted as &quot;who of the people having secretaries have a secretary other than Moser&quot;. This interpretation is not implemented, because for the majority of negated questions containing interrogative pronouns, there is no interpretation in USL. So the exceptions are not interpreted either, to avoid confusion.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="4"> The general schema would look like: (OFacc- ( (ACC ;NOMacc = APP) % OFacc) ) The examples above would be translated as: Sekret~irin, die den Sauer nicht hat Secretary, who does not have Sauer The accusative is not a relation; the answer is not defined.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="5"> Sekretiirin, die der Sauer nicht hat</Paragraph> </Section> </Section> class="xml-element"></Paper>