Showing papers on "Head (linguistics) published in 1997"

The Internal Syntax of the Dutch Extended Adjectival Projection

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the phrase structural and word order properties of the (extended) adjectival projection, a phrase structural domain which has received relatively little attention in the generative literature. Focusing on the internal syntax of Dutch adjective phrases, I will come to the following conclusions. First, there is a strong empirical (and theoretical) basis for extending the functional head hypothesis to the adjectival system (i.e. for adopting the DegP-hypothesis). Secondly, a distinction should be made between two types of functional degree categories: Deg(P) and Q(P). This split is represented structurally, with Deg selecting QP and Q selecting AP (the split degree system hypothesis). Thirdly, there is empirical support for the existence of a third functional projection, AgrP, within the adjectival domain. Fourthly, as regards directionality of headedness within the Dutch functional system, it is concluded that Deg and Q take their complements to the right, whereas Agr takes its complement to the left. It is proposed that this asymmetry of headedness within the functional structure of the adjectival projection relates to the nominal orientation of Deg and Q and the verbal orientation of Agr. Finally, three movement operations will be identified within the Dutch adjectival system: A-to-Q raising, A-to-Agr raising and leftward scrambling. The latter two are at the basis of the word order variation which is found within the Dutch adjectival system.

The Role of Lexical Heads in Parsing: Evidence from German

Abstract: Theories of sentence processing can be classified by the role that lexical heads play in first-pass parsing. In some theories, syntactic structure cannot even be built before it is licensed by a head (Abney, 1989; Prichett, 1992), whereas in other models, at the opposite extreme, only major category information in lexical items is used during the rule-based initial structure building process (Ferreira & Henderson, 1990; M itchell, 1987). In this paper, we will introduce a fully increm ental model that accounts for attachment preferences by the linear order of lexical heads in the surface structure and their thematic properties. The principle of "parameterised head attachment" and a serial variant, the SOUL mechanism, will be discussed on the basis of three on-line experim ents on NP- and PP-attachment in German verb-second and verb-final sentences.

Bulgarian preverbs : aspect in phrase structure

Abstract: This paper argues for a syntactic approach to aspectuality, where semantic information about subevent structure is incorporated into the phrase marker. Such an approach would be justified only if aspectual properties present syntactic as well as semantic effects. It is the aim of the paper to present evidence of such syntactic effects. Slavic preverbs have standardly been regarded as perfectivizing (or telicity-marking) morphemes. It will be argued that preverbs are also causative morphemes. As such, they are situated in the upper part of a VP-layer structure, a light verb widely accepted to be reserved for CAUSE. In English, the aspectual interpretation of a terminative or durative event depends on the specified or unspecified cardinality of the object (Verkuyl 1993) and aspect is calculated in a functional projection AspP between the two VP layers (Travis 1991). In Slavic, on the other hand, it is the presence or absence of a preverb in the upper verbal head that encodes a terminative or a durative interpretation. This contrast is explained with the relatively higher structural position of Slavic preverbs with respect to the functional projection AspP in English. Similar scope effects are demonstrated with articles in Russian, with interpretations of Polish and English imperfective sentences, and with manner adverbs in Bulgarian

The Acquisition of Nominal Compounding in Swedish

Abstract: In Swedish, as in other North Germanic languages, compounds are very common and a majority of the novel words in Swedish are compounds. This thesis aims at a presentation of compounding in Swedish and the problems involved in describing compounding, but mainly at an empirically founded description of children's creation and use of novel compounds and developing comprehension of compounds, especially nominal compounds. A Swedish compound contains two ore more word roots that elsewhere may function as independent words. The rightmost word is the head, which means that it determines the compound's gender and is declined for number, definiteness and case, and that the whole word is an instance (typically a hyponym) of the head. The compound is written as one word, and is pronounced with a particular intonation contour, characterized by two peaks. A noun that functions as modifier in a compound sometimes appears in a particular "liaison form". The empirical findings concerning children's acquisition of compounding are based on the following sources: (a) a corpus of around 340 spontaneous novel compounds collected from two children; (b) analysis of 258 novel nominal compounds produced by 10 children (aged between 3;5 and 6;8), who were encouraged to label picture cards.; (c) the results of a pictureidentification experiment where 60 children (aged between 2;0 and 5;4) were asked to interpret 24 novel nominal compounds; and (d) the paraphrases of 18 novel compounds that 70 children were asked to give, 4 years in succession. Some observations and results are that the compound stress pattern is established before my period of investigation, i.e. before age 2; that proper identification of the head is established around age 3; that the deletion of a final -a in a modifying noun is the first liaison form mastered by children; and that many different semantic relationships are attributed by the children to hold between the head noun and the modifying noun.

English-to-Mandarin Speech Translation with Head Transducers

Abstract: We describe the head transducer model used in an experimental English-toMandarin speech translation system. Head transduction is a translation method in which weighted finite state transducers are associated with sourcetarget word pairs. The method is suitable for speech translation because it allows efficient bottom up processing. The head transducers in the experimental system have a wider range of output positions than input positions. This asymmetry is motivated by a tradeoff between model complexity and search efficiency. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n In this paper we describe the head transducer model used for translation in an experimental English-to-Mandarin speech translation system. Head transducer models consist of collections of weighted finite state transducers associated with pairs of lexical items in a bilingual lexicon. Head transducers operate "outwards" from the heads of phrases; they convert the left and right dependents of a source word into the left and right dependents of a corresponding target word. The transducer model can be characterized as a statistical translation model, but unlike the models proposed by Brown et al. (1990, 1993), these models have non-uniform linguistically motivated structure, at present coded by hand. The underlying linguistic structure of these models is similar to dependency grammar (Hudson 1984), although dependency representations are not explicitly constructed in our approach to translation. The original motivation for the head transducer models was Fei Xia D e p a r t m e n t of C o m p u t e r and I n f o r m a t i o n Science Univers i ty of P e n n s y l v a n i a Ph i l ade lph ia , PA 19104, USA fx i aQc i s .upenn . edu that they are simpler and more amenable to automatic model structure acquisition as compared with earlier transfer models. We first describe the head transduction approach in general in Section 2. In Section 3 we explain properties of the particular head transducers used in the experimental English-to-Mandarin speech translator. In Section 4, we explain how head transducers help satisfy the requirements of the speech translation application, and we conclude in Section 5. 2 B i l i n g u a l H e a d T r a n s d u c t i o n 2.1 Bilingual Head Transducers A head transducer M is a finite state machine associated with a pair of words, a source word w and a target word v. In fact, w is taken from the set V1 consisting of the source language vocabulary augmented by the "empty word" e, and v is taken from V~, the target language vocabulary augmented with e. A head transducer reads from a pair of source sequences, a left source sequence L1 and a right source sequence Rt; it writes to a pair of target sequences, a left target sequence L2 and a right target sequence R2 (Figure 1). Head transducers were introduced in Alshawi 1996b, where the symbols in the source and target sequences are source and target words respectively. In the model described in this paper, the symbols written are dependency relation symbols, or the empty symbol e. The use of relation symbols here is a result of the historical development of the system from an earlier transfer model. A conceptually simpler translator can be built using head transducer models with only lexical items, in which case the distinction between different dependents is implicit in the state of a transducer. In head transducer models, the use of relations corresponds to a type of class-based model (cf Je-

Switching at no cost: Exploring Spanish-English codeswitching using the response-contingent sentence matching task

Abstract: The Functional Head Constraint (Belazi, Rubin and Toribio, 1994) states that codeswitching is not allowed between a functional head and its complement. This predicts that switches between determiners and noun phrase complements, complementizers and inflected clausal (IP) complements, and auxiliaries and verb phrase complements should be ungrammatical. Conversely, the proposed constraint predicts that verb-complement and preposition-complement switches should be grammatical. This study tested four of these five predictions, using codeswitched Spanish/English sentences which met or violated the Functional Head Constraint. The subjects were Spanish-English bilinguals who had learned both languages before the age of six and who use both languages in their daily lives. Data were collected using the Response-Contingent Matching Task (Stevenson, 1992). Subjects read a sentence displayed on a computer screen and press a button when the reading is completed. They then read a second sentence aligned below the first one and press one of two buttons to indicate whether the two sentences on the screen are the SAME or DIFFERENT. Grammaticality of the codeswitch was established by comparing reading times on all SAME sentences. The sentences that violated the Functional Head Constraint were expected to receive significantly longer reading times than the sentences which comply with the constraint. The results obtained do not support the predictions made by the Functional Head Constraint, but do confirm the validity of the task procedure. The findings are compared with naturalistic data and are interpreted using the Minimalist Theory of Chomsky (1991 and 1992).

Subcategorization inheritance in Old English P-V compounds

Abstract: This article deals with the relation between subcategorization and the notion head in OE [P-V] compounds. Many morphosyntactic properties such as category and morphological class percolate from the head to the mother. Subcategorization, however, can percolate to the mother from a nonhead as well as from the head. This is evident from the comparison of their case government properties. This paper shows that the process of ARGUMENT ATTRACTION developed within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar permits a straightforward account of this phenomenon. This paper will examine the subcategorization (or valence) of P-V compounds (for example, over-come) in Old English (OE) and the relationship between the subcategorization of the whole compound and the subcategorizations of its parts, as evidenced by their respective case government. The symbol P represents a preverb (for example, over) which is homophonous with a

How many beliefs can dance in the head of the self-deceived?

Abstract: Mele desires to believe that the self-deceived have consistent beliefs. Beliefs are not observable, but are instead ascribed within an explanatory framework. Because explanatory cogency is the only criterion for belief attribution, Mele should carefully attend to the logic of belief-desire explanation. He does not, and the consistency of his own account as well as that of the self-deceived, are the victims.

Class 5 allomorphy in Ciyao

Abstract: Studies of Ciyao, a Bantu language classified as P.21 by Guthrie [1967-71], agree that there are 18 noun classes, each of which determines a primary prefix on the noun, and concord prefixes on elements that agree with head nouns. Most of the primary prefixes have the shape CV- or N- both in Proto-Bantu and in Ciyao. In contemporary Ciyao, class 5 nouns take a prefix which has two allomorphs, the expected CV- di- alternating with the isolated CVV- dii-, posing the problem of how to explain their source and distribution. The purpose of this paper is to document the realization of Ciyao class 5 in detail, and to demonstrate that the di-/ dii- alternation is prosodically conditioned.

Tickets to His Head: Larry Gelbart (1928-) as Writer and Adaptor.

Abstract: Larry Gelbart (1928-) has dominated the field of comedy writing in the latter half of the twentieth century the way George S. Kaufman (1889-1961) dominated the first half. Comedy, according to Gelbart, is a “tic—a way of making myself comfortable. I can’t imagine not having comedy to lean on. I tend to write things with a circus-like atmosphere. In my mind, there’s a circus—three rings—all the time.” The three comedy rings in his head may be classified according to the areas where his unique talents especially emerge: (1) talent to adapt comedy from one medium to another, or from one historical period to another; (2) talent with words, to use precise language to detail character, layer meaning, or simply get the biggest laugh: and (3) talent to satirize—to show the world what his eyes see and his ears hear, and invite the audience to become angry, too. The rings in Gelbart’s head constantly rearrange themselves, for he has been an ardent student of comedy and the human condition throughout his career. Gelbart, although involved in some of the most historically important or successful projects in radio (Duffy’s Tavern [19461, The Bob Hope Show [1948]), theatre (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum [1962], Sly Fox [1976], City of Angels [1989\, Mastergate [1989]), television (Caesar’s Hour [1957], M*A*S*H [19721), and film (Oh, God! [1976], Tootsie [1983]), prefers to stay out of

An hybrid image processing approach to liptracking independent of head orientation.

Abstract: This paper examines the influence of head orientation in liptracking. There are two main conclusions: First, lip gesture analysis and head movement correction should be processed independently. Second, the measurement of articulatory parameters may be corrupted by head movement if it is performed directly at the pixel level. We thus propose an innovative technique of liptracking which relies on a "3D active contour" model of the lips controlled by articulatory parameters. The 3D model is projected onto the image of a speaking face through a camera model, thus allowing spatial re-orientation of the head. Liptracking is then performed by automatic adjustment of the control parameters, independently of head orientation. The final objective of our study is to apply a pixel-based method to detect head orientation. Nevertheless, we consider that head motion and lip gestures are detected by different processes, whether cognitive (by humans) or computational (by machines). Due to this, we decided to first develop and evaluate orientation-free liptracking through a non video-based head motion detection technique which is here presented.

Device and method for speech recognition, device and method for dictionary generation, and information storage medium

Abstract: PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To speed up speed recognition. SOLUTION: A word notation correspondence dictionary 5 is stored previously with speeches of recognition candidates while they are classified by the readings of the head parts. The readings of the head parts of '100' and '150' are 'hyaku'. When a voice is inputted to a voice input means 3, the speech whose head part has the same reading with its head part is detected by a speech recognition means 4 in the word notation correspondence dictionary 5. The reading to be processed for speech recognition is limited to the head part, so the number of head parts is decreased and the processing is completed fast.

Mr. Head's Journey to the Cross: Character, Structure, and Meaning in O'Connor's "The Artificial Nigger"

Abstract: Jesus is \"SO SOUL hungry\" that \"he will chase [man] over the waters of sin\" and \"have him in the end,\" we are told in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood.1 God's Providential plan for human salvation, God's loving desire to bring man home to him, is, in fact, a major theme of O'Connor's Christian comedy. Again and again her fiction illustrates that even when man is engulfed in the darkness of disbelief, sin, and despair, God's plan is in progress, for the love of God is greater than human sinfulness. To illustrate God's transformation of apparent evil into a real and greater good, O'Connor purposely chooses what would seem the most unlikely agents for the salvation of her characters: the sociopathic Misfit of \"A Good Man Is Hard to Find,\" who unwittingly prompts the Grandmother to her one moment of grace through love, thus becoming the instrument of her salvation; or the self-blinding of Wise Blood's Hazel Motes, which allows him to see as St. Paul saw and to bring that point of light to his landlady. This is also her technique in the \"Artificial Nigger,\" in which she uses a

Scanning type printing device

Abstract: PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a scanning type printing device which can arrange a preprint pattern of paper in which ruled lines, character frames, etc., are printed in advance and the print pattern of characters to be printed simply at desired positions. SOLUTION: A printing position display 40 can freely change distance from an ink-jet head 2 and displays printing characters to be printed by the head 2 and a preprint pattern 47 of ruled lines, character frames, etc., on paper 46 which are overlapped with each other. CPU controls the head 2 based on the relative movement between the head 2 and the paper 46 so that the characters are printed at positions displayed on the display 40.

Determiners and incorporation in Maori

Abstract: The noun phrase in Maori has been analysed by Waite 1994 and Dooley Collberg 1994 using a DP structure of the type first introduced by Abney 1987. This article presents additional evidence in the form of incorporation data which supports the DP analysis and the classification of the singular determiner te as the head of DP.