Showing papers on "Antecedent (grammar) published in 1993"

Verb phrase ellipsis: form, meaning, and processing

Abstract: The central claim of this dissertation is that an elliptical VP is a proform. This claim has two primary consequences: first, the elliptical VP can have no internal syntactic structure. Second, the interpretation of VP ellipsis must be governed by the same general conditions governing other proforms, such as pronouns. The basic condition governing the interpretation of a proform is that it must be semantically identified with its antecedent. A computational model is described in which this identification is mediated by store and retrieve operations defined with respect to a discourse model. Because VP ellipsis is treated on a par with other proforms, the ambiguity arising from "sloppy identity" becomes epiphenomenal, resulting from the fact that the store and retrieve operations are freely ordered. A primary argument for the proform theory of VP ellipsis concerns syntactic constraints on variables within the antecedent. I examine many different types of variables, including reflexives, reciprocals, negative polarity items, and wh-traces. In all these cases, syntactic constraints are not respected under ellipsis. This indicates that the relation governing VP ellipsis is semantic rather than syntactic. In further support of the proform theory, I show that there is a striking similarity in the antecedence possibilities for VP ellipsis and those for pronouns. Two computer programs demonstrate the claims of this dissertation. One program implements the semantic copying required to resolve VP ellipsis, demonstrating the correct set of possible readings for the examples of interest. The second program selects the antecedent for a VP ellipsis occurrence. This program has been tested on several hundred examples of VP ellipsis, automatically collected from corpora.

Teaching a chained task with a simultaneous prompting procedure

Abstract: Simultaneous prompting, a type of antecedent prompt and test procedure, was used to teach the chained task of making juice from a frozen concentrate using a pictorial recipe to four elementary-aged students with moderate intellectual disabilities. Using a multiple probe design, all students acquired the task and maintained the behavior with at least 85% accuracy up to 60 days after training was terminated. In addition, students generalized the skill across settings and materials. The students' ability to expressively identify the words shown on the recipe cards was tested prior to and after training. Although not directly trained, three of the four students increased their ability to read the words.

Children's development of long-distance binding in Chinese

Abstract: This paper examines Chinese children's knowledge of long-distance binding of the bare reflexiveziji (self) and their knowledge of other proforms, namely,taziji (himself) andta (him). The experimental results from previous research and the current study, indicate that only very few children consistently allowziji to be long-distance bound. Based on the suggestion thatziji is covertly local in nature and that long-distance binding is caused by the movement ofziji in Logical Form, two hypotheses concerning children's lack of long-distance binding were tested. Hypothesis 1 states that children moveziji to an adjoined non-argument position in Logical Form. However, since they do not have the ability to transfer referential features from a higher NP to a non-argument position, they do not have long-distance binding. Hypothesis 2 states that children do not moveziji in Logical Form. Sinceziji may only receive, its referential features from a local binder, a long-distance binder is not a possible antecedent for young children. The results of the current study do not totally confirm or disconfirm either hypothesis but raise several theoretical and empirical questions which each hypothesis must answer.

When would Natural Laws have been Broken

Abstract: It is often held that laws of nature bear a special relation to counterfactual conditionals. In particular, it is suggested that one should retain, under a counterfactual antecedent, all of those claims that one believes to be law-statements, if the antecedent is consistent with all of those claims. I'll call this principle 'nomic preservation': If p q (read 'Had p obtained, then q would have obtained') and p is consistent with L, the conjunction of all and only the statements of natural law, then pq and if p is consistent with L and it is a logical truth that (pL neither Lewis nor Slote denies that it would. Slote's counterfactual seems strange because our standard reason for contemplating a counterfactual antecedent, such as 'Had I been depressed yesterday', is not to determine whether every past moment would then have been different in some respect or other, but to consider some particular moment and to examine whether it would then have been different in some particular way. Had I been depressed yesterday, would I have cried all day or phoned you? Had I been depressed sometime yesterday, would someone have to have first reminded me of the famine in Somalia, since I was in such a good mood?

Medieval numerology : a book of essays

Abstract: Explores how during the Middle Ages, numbers were clues to the structure of creation, metaphors for the construction of music and poetry, literary "signatures," the antecedent of modern accounting, and other elements of normal life. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Lexicon-Based Algorithms for the Automatic Analysis of Natural Language

Abstract: Let us examine the following discourse (D) from the point of view of elementary grammatical analysis: (D) Two men cleaned the offices, then, they waited for the janitor This discourse is composed of two members: two simple sentences connected by the conjunction 'then'. One of the elements needed for the interpretation of (D) lies in the nature of the antecedent of the pronoun 'they'. In principle, the pronoun 'they' refers to the noun phrase 'two men' of the first member, but it might indicate a group of persons different from these two men, if (D) is attached to an appropriate context or background. Whether the scene which constitutes the interpretation of (D) includes 3 persons (2 men and 1 janitor) or more depends entirely on the analysis of 'they'. Such questions of resolution of pronouns are trivial for a native speaker of English, but they become of paramount importance when one attempts a computer analysis of texts, and also when a reader who does not know well the language in which the discourse (D) is written tries to understand it. In both situations, in order to interpret (D), detailed dictionaries and grammars must be available which account for the relations occurring between the terms of (D). In this article, we are going to simulate the computation of the search for the antecedent(s) of 'they'. We will simplify this procedure by omitting its clerical aspects. In this way, we throw into relief the nature and the amount of information that must be stored in a lexicon-grammar, since, as we will see, we do not draw the usual line of demarcation between these two components of a language.

The Syntax of Relative Clauses with a First or Second Person Antecedent in Biblical Hebrew

Abstract: IN the wake of a discussion on the nature of the prophetic hay-passages, D. R. Hillers made the important observation that in Biblical Hebrew (BH), as in other Semitic languages, a vocative may sometimes be continued by a clause or a phrase in the third person.' He listed a larger number of examples of this phenomenon, without attempting more detailed analysis or categorization. His idea was further developed, especially with regard to the hay-oracles, by J. J. M. Roberts.2 With regard to the larger question of syntactic usage in BH, however, Roberts could do no more than state the need for further research: \"The phenomenon of discongruence and the syntax of the vocative deserve new treatment in Hebrew grammar; Kainig's work is inadequate, and most grammars hardly touch on the problem.\"3 The recent monograph on discongruence by J. Levi does not entirely eliminate this desideratum.4 In this article, one important aspect of the question will be dealt with, namely, that of congruence and discongruence in relative clauses with a first or second person antecedent.5 Though the material is scant and, in some cases, insufficient, focusing on relative clauses will permit us to establish a rule and discover a rationale. To what extent the syntax of the relative clause throws new light on other cases of discongruence is a question that must be left for future research (see, however, the appendix below). This study will be restricted to attributive relative clauses, i.e., such clauses having an explicit nominal or pronominal antecedent.6 Such relative clauses may be either syndetic, that is, joined to the antecedent by means of the particles as'er or se( Qa-), or asyndetic, dispensing with such a particle. The second type is mostly limited to poetry. In either type, the antecedent is usually referred to in the relative clause by a pronominal

Pronominal and Anaphor Resolution

Abstract: Chomsky's Binding ConditioJtS imply that each position of an antecedent of an anaphor cannot be a position for the antecedent of a pronominal. However, there have been examples in the literature where the above implication does not hold. A brief review of the linguistic background and the various definitions, relevant to this problem, given by other researchers is presented. Careful examination of these definitions leads to the conclusion that the problem can be resolved by considering two different definitions of the governing category, one for the governing category of a pronominal and one for the governing category of an anaphor. The definitions and rules selected are used to design computer algorithms. Using the Binding Conditions it is possible to find only the impossible antecedents in case of pronominals. Other algorithms which combine the information available from these conditions, in order to find the possible antecedents of any pronominal are also suggested.

A Knowledge-Based and Sublanguage-Oriented Model for Anaphora Resolution

Abstract: The paper discusses a new knowledge-based and sublanguage-oriented model for anaphora resolution, which integrates syntactic, semantic, discourse, domain and heuristical knowledge for the sublanguage of computer science. Special attention is paid to a new approach for tracking the center of a discourse segment, which plays an important role in proposing the most likely antecedent to the anaphor in case of ambiguity. INTRODUCTION Anaphora resolution is a complicated problem in computational linguistics. Considerable research has been done by computational linguists ([Carbonell & Brown 88], [Dahl & Ball 90], [Frederking & Gehrke 87], [Hayes 81], [Hobbs 78], [Ingria & Stallard 89], [Rich & LuperFoy 88], [Robert 89]), but no complete theory has emerged which offers a resolution procedure with success guaranteed. All approaches developed even if we restrict our attention to pronominal anaphora, which we will do throughout this paper from purely syntactic ones to highly semantic and pragmatic ones, only provide a partial treatment of the problem. Given the complexity of the problem, we think that to secure a comparatively successful handling of anaphora resolution one should adhere to the following principles: 1) restriction to a domain (sublanguage) rather than focus on a particular natural language as a whole; 2) maximal use of linguistic information integrating it into a uniform architecture by means of partial theories. Some more recent treatments of anaphora ([Carbonell & Brown 88], [Rich & LuperFoy 88]) do express the idea of "multi-level approach", or "distributed architecture", but their ideas a) do not seem to capture enough discourse and heuristical knowledge and b) do not concentrate on and investigate a concrete domain, and thus risk being too general. We have tried nevertheless to incorporate some of their ideas into our own proposals. THE ANAPHORA RESOLUTION MODEL Our anaphora resolution model integrates modules containing different types of knowledge syntactic, semantic, domain, discourse, heuristical and common sense/world knowledge. All the modules share a common representation of the current discourse. The syntactic module, for example, knows that the anaphor and antecedent must agree in number, gender and person. It checks if the c-command constraints hold and establishes disjoint reference. In cases of syntactic parallelism, it prefers the noun phrase with the same syntactic role as the anaphor, as the most probable antecedent. It knows when cataphora is possible and can indicate syntactically topicalized noun phrases, which are more likely to be antecedents than non-topicalized ones. The semantic module checks for semantic consistency between the anaphor and the possible antecedent. It filters out semantically incompatible candidates following the

Temporal interpretations of sentences with complement clauses

Abstract: This work concerns temporal interpretations in those sentences with complement clauses. A central fact about temporal reference is that it involves orientation or anchoring to some time. Many temporal expressions (such as tense, time adverbials) are not interpretable if one does not know how they are anchored. How to identify the anchor (i.e., the antecedent of temporal anaphora, or temporal antecedent) is important especially in the sentences that describe multiple events. The authors present an extension of tense theory to accommodate the sequence-of-tense (SOT) phenomena and propose an identification method for temporal antecedent. Then according to the temporal antecedent, the temporal meaning for the verb form of a complement clause can be assigned and its interpretation is accurately obtained.