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Phrase

About: Phrase is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 12580 publications have been published within this topic receiving 317823 citations. The topic is also known as: syntagma & phrases.


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This study has provided evidence confirming Grimshaw's (1979) conclusion that syntactic and semantic conditions on lexical insertion are autonomous, and ended with a lexical entry whose sole syntactic constraint is that there is a single postverbal complement.
Abstract: We have successfully accounted for all the data of section 2 with the single unified entry (27). The price has been two innovations in the semantic structure of lexical items: the curly bracket notation for alternative realizations of variables, and the P operator. Each of these has been independently motivated. Returning to the general issue that motivated this study, we have maintained a strong correspondence between syntactic ϑ-positions and semantic argument positions. However, the correspondence need not be strictly one-to-one. We have seen multiple argument positions for a single ϑ-position in transitive climb, transaction verbs such as buy and sell, and possibly intransitive dress. We have also seen, possibly, that an argument may be multiply filled, once by a subcategorized phrase and once by a nonsubcategorized phrase. We have also seen that the correspondence between syntactic and semantic structure is encoded in lexical entries by means of principles more complex than seems to have been suspected. And the complexities we have found are for climb, which intuition suggests is a relatively simple item with rather transparent semantics. When we attempt to represent verbs with complicated options for sentential complementation (such as know and ask), we should expect the descriptive problems to multiply. Eventually, of course, one would like to adequately constrain the theory of syntax-semantics linkages in the lexicon. The present study should caution us, however, of the danger of applying Occam's razor too soon, thereby cutting off one's hand. This study has also provided evidence confirming Grimshaw's (1979) conclusion that syntactic and semantic conditions on lexical insertion are autonomous. Here we have ended with a lexical entry whose sole syntactic constraint is that there is a single postverbal complement. The syntactic category of the complement, however, is determined by the range of semantic categories possible in the corresponding variables. Viewed from a different angle, though, one might say that it is the availability of only one syntactic complement position that prevents both semantic variables from being expressed at once. There is nothing conceptually wrong with * Bill climbed the mountain up the ropes, in which both postverbal complements fill j-variables in (27) — it is just a syntactic fact about the English verb climb that makes it ungrammatical. To sum up, then, the subcategorization feature is not simply a projection of argument structure, as generally assumed. Rather, ϑ-structure and argument structure are better thought of as each constraining potential projections of the other. Finally, it is evident that these issues could not have been investigated without a fairly explicit theory of semantic structure like Conceptual Semantics. I hope to have provided here a taste of what syntactic theory may have missed out on, as a result of its habit of viewing semantics through the narrow window of more traditional formalizations of predicate-argument structure. I am grateful to Jane Grimshaw and David Olson for helpful discussion of this material, and to Jerrold Katz and especially another (anonymous) NLLT reviewer for many insightful comments on an earlier version. The puzzle of rent in section 4 goes back to discussions with Joe Emonds around 1966. This research was supported in part by NSF Grant IST-8120403 to Brandeis University, and in part by NSF Grant BNS-7622943 to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where my initial exploration of climb took place one typically glorious day in February 1984.

70 citations

Patent
17 Dec 1998
TL;DR: In this article, a method and system for generating a weight for phrases within each document in a collection of documents is presented, where each phrase comprises component terms, and the phrase frequency represents the number of occurrences of a phrase in a document.
Abstract: A method and system for generating a weight for phrases within each document in a collection of documents. Each document has terms such as words and numbers. Each phrase comprises component terms. Each term frequency represents the number of occurrences of a term in a document, and the phrase frequency represents the number of occurrences of a phrase in a document. To generate the weight, the weighting system first estimates a document frequency for the phrase by multiplying an estimated phrase probability of the phrase times the number of documents that contain each component term. The estimated phrase probability is an estimation of the probability that any phrase in documents that contain each component term is the phrase whose weight is to be estimated. The document frequency is the number of the documents that contain the phrase. The weighting system then estimates a total phrase frequency for the phrase as the average phrase frequency for the phrase times the estimated document frequency for the phrase. The weighting system derives the average phrase frequency from the phrase probability of the phrase and average number of terms per document. The weighting system then combines the estimated document frequency with the estimated total phrase frequency to generate the weight of the phrase.

70 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: HiFST, a lattice-based decoder for hierarchical phrase-based translation and alignment is described, finding that the use of WFSTs rather than k-best lists requires less pruning in translation search, resulting in fewer search errors, better parameter optimization, and improved translation performance.
Abstract: In this article we describe HiFST, a lattice-based decoder for hierarchical phrase-based translation and alignment. The decoder is implemented with standard Weighted Finite-State Transducer (WFST) operations as an alternative to the well-known cube pruning procedure. We find that the use of WFSTs rather than k-best lists requires less pruning in translation search, resulting in fewer search errors, better parameter optimization, and improved translation performance. The direct generation of translation lattices in the target language can improve subsequent rescoring procedures, yielding further gains when applying long-span language models and Minimum Bayes Risk decoding. We also provide insights as to how to control the size of the search space defined by hierarchical rules. We show that shallow-n grammars, low-level rule catenation, and other search constraints can help to match the power of the translation system to specific language pairs.

70 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Findings suggest that knowledge of harmonic structure influences perceptual organization of melodies in ways analogous to the influence of clause relations on the perceptual organizations of sentences and provide evidence that training plays an important role in refining listeners’ sensitivity to harmonic variables.
Abstract: Musicians and nonmusicians indicated whether a two-note probe following a tonally structured melody occurred in the melody. The critical probes were taken from one of three locations in the melody: the two notes (1) ending the first phrase, (2) straddling the phrase boundary, and (3) beginning the second phrase. As predicted, the probe that straddled the phrase boundary was more difficult to recognize than either of the within-phrase probes. These findings suggest that knowledge of harmonic structure influences perceptual organization of melodies in ways analogous to the influence of clause relations on the perceptual organization of sentences. They also provide evidence that training plays an important role in refining listeners’ sensitivity to harmonic variables.

70 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Mar 2015-Syntax
TL;DR: In this article, the authors report on the results of five experiments documenting the existence of three distinct grammars of conjunct agreement in Slovenian, found both within and across individuals.
Abstract: In this paper we report on the results of five experiments documenting the existence of three distinct grammars of conjunct agreement in Slovenian, found both within and across individuals: agreement with the highest conjunct, agreement with the closest conjunct, or agreement with the Boolean Phrase itself. We show that this variation is constrained and that some of these mechanisms can be blocked and/or forced depending on the properties of the conjuncts. Finally, we offer the suggestion that the presence of intraindividual variation arises because of ambiguous properties of the primary linguistic data.

70 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
2023467
20221,079
2021360
2020470
2019525
2018535