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<Paper uid="P99-1019">
  <Title>Bilingual Hebrew-English Generation of Possessives and Partitives: Raising the Input Abstraction Level</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="145" end_page="149" type="relat">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Possessives and Partitives in
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"/>
    <Section position="1" start_page="145" end_page="145" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
Hebrew and English
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> This section briefly presents data on possessives and partitives in English and Hebrew.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> These observations delimit the questions we address in the paper: when is a genitive construct used to express possessives and when is an explicit partitive used.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="2" start_page="145" end_page="145" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.1 Possessives in English
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      <Paragraph position="0"> Possessives can be realized in two basic structures: as part of the determiner sequence (Halliday, 1994) (as either a possessive pronoun or a full NP marked with apostrophe-s as a genitive marker) or as a construct NP of NP.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> In addition to possessive, the genitive marker can realize several semantic relations (Quirk et al., 1985) (pp.192-203): subjective genitive (the boy's application --the boy applied) , genitive of origin (the girl's story -- the girl told a story), objective genitive, descriptive genitive (a women's college -- a college for woman).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> As a consequence of this versatility, the general decision of apostrophe vs. of is not trivial: Quirk claims that the higher on the gender scale, i.e., the more animate the noun, the more the possessor realization tends to be realized as an inflected genitive:  * Person's name: Segovia's pupil * Person's nouns: the boy's new shirt * Collective nouns: the nation's social security null * Higher Animals: the horse's neck * Geographical names: Europe's future * Locative nouns: the school's history * Temporal nouns: the decade's event  This decision also interacts with other realization decisions: if several modifiers must be attached to the same head, they can compete for the same slot in the syntactic structure. In such cases, the decision is one of preference ranking: The boy's application of last year vs. last year's application of the boy.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="3" start_page="145" end_page="146" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.2 Possessives in Hebrew
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> The construct state (called smixut) is similar to the apostrophe marker in English: it involves a noun adjacent to another noun or noun phrase, without any marker (like a preposition) between them (Berman, 1978). The head noun in the construct form generally undergoes morphological changes: yaldah - yaldat. Smixut is, on the one hand, very productive in Hebrew and yet very constrained (Dahan-Netzer and E1hadad, 1998b).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1">  Free genitive constructs use a prepositional phrase with the preposition Sel. Many studies treat Sel as a case marker only (cf. (Berman, 1978) (Yzhar, 1993) (Borer, 1988)).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> The choice of one of the three forms seems to be stylistic and vary in spoken and written Hebrew (cf. (Berman, 1978), (Glineft, 1989), (Ornan, 1964), and discussion in (Seikevicz, 1979)). But, in addition to these pragmatic factors and as is the case for the English genitive, the construct state can realize a wide variety of semantic relations (Dahan-Netzer and Elhadad, 1998b), (Azar, 1985), (Levi, 1976). The selection is also a matter of preference ranking among competitors for the same syntactic slot. For example, we have shown in (Dahan-Netzer and Elhadad, 1998b) that the semantic relations that can be realized by a construct state are the ones defined as classifier in SURGE. Therefore, the co-occurrence of such a relation with another classifier leads to a competition for the syntactic slot of &amp;quot;classifier&amp;quot; and also contributes to the decision of how to realize a possessive.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3">  If only the possessor is provided in the following input, it can be mapped to a construct state: Simlat ha-yaldah dress-cs the-girl the girl's dress If a classifier is provided in addition, the construct-state slot is not available anymore 1, and the free genitive construct must be used: Simlat ha-Sabat Sel ha-yaldah dress-cs the-Shabat of the-girl The Shabat dress of the girl l If the classifier had been specified in the input as a semantic relation as discussed in (Dahan-Netzer and Elhadad, 1998b), an alternative realization (The girl's dress/or Shabat) could have been obtained.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="4" start_page="146" end_page="146" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.3 Partitives in English
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> The partitive relation denotes a subset of the thing to which the head of a noun phrase refers. A partitive relation can be realized in two main ways: as part of the pre-determiner sequence (Halliday, 1994), (Winograd, 1983) using quantifiers that have a partitive meaning (e.g., some/most/many/one-third (of the) children) or using a construction of the form a measure/X of Y.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> There are three subtypes of the partitive construction ((Quirk et al., 1985)\[p.130\], (Halliday, 1994)): measure a mile of cable, typical partitives a loaf of bread, a slice of cake, and general partitives: a piece/bit/of an item of X.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> In the syntactic structure of a partitive structure, the part is the head of the phrase (and determines agreement), but the Thing - is what is being measured. This creates an interesting difference ~)etween the logical and syntactic structure of the NP.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> (Mel'cuk and Perstov, 1987) defines the elective surface syntactic relation which connects an of-phrase to superlative adjectives or numerals. An elective phrase is an elliptical structure: the rightmost \[string\] of the strings. It can be headed by an adjective in superlative form (the poorest among the nation), a numeral (45 of these 256 sentences), ordinal (the second of three) or a quantitative word having the feature elect: all, most, some of... The elective relation can be used recursively (Many of the longest of the first 45 of these 256 sentences).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4"> In the case of quantifier-partitives, one must decide whether to use an explicitly partitive construct (some of the children) or not (some children). The structure that does not use of is used for generic NPs (when the head is non-definite: most children). For specific reference, the of-construction is optional with nouns and obligatory with pronouns: all (of) the meat all of it</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="5" start_page="146" end_page="147" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.4 Partitives in Hebrew
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> There are two possible ways to express partitivity in Hebrew: using a construction of  the form X me-Y, or using a partitive quantifier. In contrast to English, quantifiers that are marked as partitive, cannot be used in an explicitly partitive structure:</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> Conversely, a quantifier that is not marked as partitive can be used in an explicitly partitive structure: harbeh yeladym - many children harbeh me-hayeladym - many of the children mewat ha-yeladym - few the-children mewat me-ha-yeladym - few of the-children There are complex restrictions in Hebrew on the co-occurrence of several determiners in the same NP and on their relative ordering within the NP. To explain them, Glinert (Glinert, 1989) adopts a functional perspective, quite appropriate to the needs of a generation system, and identifies a general pattern for the NP, that we use as a basis for the mapping rules in HUGG: \[partitive determiner amount head classifiers describers post-det/quant qualifiers\] Yzhar and Doron (Doron, 1991) (Yzhar, 1993) distinguish between two sets of determiners, that they call D and Q quantifiers. The distinction is based on syntactic features, such as position, ability to be modified, ability to participate in partitive structures and requirement to agree in number and gender with the head. This distinction is used to explain co-occurrence restrictions, the order of appearance of D vs Q quantifiers and the recursive structure of D determiners: D determiners can be layered on top of other D determiners. A single Q quantifier can occur in an NP and it remains attached closest to the head.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> In (Dahan-Netzer, 1997) and (Dahan-Netzer and Elhadad, 1998a), we have refined the D/Q classification and preferred using functional criteria: we map the Q quantitiers to the &amp;quot;amount&amp;quot; category defined by Glinert, and the D set is split into the partitive and determiner categories - each with a different function. Of these, only partitives are recursive.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4"> Given these observations, the following decisions must be left &amp;quot;open&amp;quot; in the input to the realizer: how to map a possessor to dif- null ferent realizations; in which order to place co-occurring quantifiers; and whether to use an explicit of construct for partitive quantitiers. The input specification language must also enforce that only acceptable recursive structures be expressible.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="5"> 3 Defining an Abstract Input</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="6" start_page="147" end_page="149" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
for NP Realization
3.1 Input Features
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> The input structure for NPs we adopt is split in four groups of features, which appear in  Figure 3.1: * Head or reference-set: defines the thing or set referred to by the NP * Qualifying: adds information to the thing * Identifying: identifies the thing among other possible referents * Quantifying: determines the quantity or  amount of the thing.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> The main modifications from the existing SURGE input structure are the introduction of the re/-set feature and the update of the usage of the possessor feature.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> For both of these features, the main requirement on the realizer is to properly handle cases of &amp;quot;competition&amp;quot; for the same restricted syntactic slot, as illustrated in the Shabat dress example above.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> The possible realizations of possessor are controlled by the feature realize-possessor-as free-genitive, bound or double-genitive. Defaults (unmarked cases) vary between the two languages and the co-occurrence constraints also vary, because each form is mapped to different syntactic slots.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4"> For example, a bound possessor is mapped to the determiner slot in English, while in Hebrew it is mapped to a classifier slot.  When possessives are realized as free genitives, they are mapped to the slot of qualifiers, usually in the front position. Borochovsky (Borochovsky, 1986) discusses exceptions to this ordering rule in Hebrew: Vawadah l-wirwurym Sel ha-miSTarah The commission for.appeals of the-police * Vawadah Sel ha-MiSTarah l-wirwurym In this example, the purpose-modifier is &amp;quot;closer&amp;quot; semantically to the head than the possessor. The ordering decision must rely on semantic information (purpose) that is not available in our general input structure (cf. (Dahan-Netzer and Elhadad, 1998b) for an even more abstract proposal).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="5"> Realization rules in each language take into account the restrictions on possible mappings for the possessor by unifying the feature realize-possessive-as based on the lexical properties of both the head and the possessor: Construct-state not ok for possessive relation with proper name:  Similarly, the possible realizations of the partitive are controlled by the feature realize-partitive-as: of or quantifier. Quantifiers are classifed along the portion/amount dimension. This system can be realized either lexically by quantifiers marked as partitive, or by using an explicit partitive syntactic structure X rae-Y/X of Y.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="6"> Because the realization grammar uses the knowledge of which word realizes which function, the distinction among partitive quantifiers, amount quantifiers and determiners predicts the order of the words in the Hebrew NP. The standard order is: \[partitive determiner amount head\] As noted above, only partitives can enter into recursive structures, in both Hebrew  and English. Accordingly, our input specification language enforces the constraint that only a single amount and a single identification feature can be present simultaneously. Whenever a partitive quantifier is desired, the input specification must include a ref-set feature instead of the head. This enforces the constraint that partitives yield recursive constructs, similarly to Mel'cuk's electiverelation. Such recursive structures are illustrated in the following example: wasarah me-col ha-maffgynym ten off-all the-demonstrators Ten off all off the demonstrators  ref-set ref-set definite yes The input is abstract enough to let the realization grammar decide whether to build an explicitly partitive construction. This decision depends on the lexical features of the realizing quantifiers and is different in English and Hebrew, as discussed above.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="7"> Additional realization rules take into account additional co-occurrence restrictions. For example, in Hebrew, if the &amp;quot;portion&amp;quot; part is modified with adjectives, then an explicitly partitive construction must be used: ha-roy ha-gadoi mi-beyn ha-yeladym the-most the-big of-from the-children The vast majority of the children In summary, we have presented a set of input features for complex NPs that include the abstract possessor and re.f-set features. These two features can be mapped to different syntactic slots. Realization rules in the grammar control the mapping of these features based on complex co-occurrence restrictions. They also take into account the lexical properties of specific quantifiers and determiners when deciding whether to use explicitly partitive constructions. Finally, the input structure enforces that only partitive relations can enter into recursive structures. Both HUGG in Hebrew and SURGE in English have been adapted to support this modified input specification.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
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