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Event Entry
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What and Who
Adjunctvalents, cumulative scopings and impossible descriptions
Bob Levine
Ohio State University
Computerlinguistisches Kolloquium
AG 1, AG 2, AG 3, AG 4
Expert Audience
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Date, Time and Location
Thursday, 4 July 2002
16:00
-- Not specified --
17.3 - Computerlinguistik
Seminar Room
Saarbrücken
Abstract
Bob Levine
Department of Linguistics
The Ohio State University
Recent traceless accounts of extraction, such as Bouma, Malouf and
Sag's important recent paper in NLLT v.19, `Satisfying constraints on
extraction and adjunction' (BMS), rely on a mechanism roughly
characterizable as valence reduction as the principle means for
terminating extraction pathways. In place of empty categories
occupying positions in phrase structure, this approach assumes that
gaps correspond to cases where a lexical head has failed to combine
with a category it normally selects. The connectivity mechanism which
links fillers to their gap sites via SLASH propagation is, on this
approach, revised to mark relevant heads so that their valence is
reduced by exactly the filler element(s) to which they are linked;
thus, in a sentence such as `On which table did you put the book', the
sign corresponding to `put' which appears in the HPSG representation
of this sentence simply does not take a PP valent, and hence the
latter never appears as a sister to the head, though a description of
suppressed PP complement does appear on the verb's
ARG(ument)-ST(ructure) and DEP(endent)S list. But on such an account,
the extraction of adjuncts is immediately ruled out on the assumption
long held in syntactic theory that adjuncts are unselected sisters of
phrasal projections.
BMS argue that this assumption has no strong motivation. They defend
the position that it is not only conceptually preferable (assuming the
correctness of their overall approach to extraction) but empirically
motivated to take adjuncts to be selected elements appearing on COMPS
lists, and to be suppressed as valents in cases of adjunct extraction
by exactly the same interaction of relational constraints as extracted
complements. They offer, as independent corroboration for this line of
analysis, evidence from a number of quarters which strongly suggest
that adjuncts are indeed dependents of heads, and emphasize in
particular certain facts about the possibility of adjuncts scoping
within complex lexical items in Japanese and Dutch to support their
treatment of adjuncts as valents of lexical heads.
In this presentation I show that a rather common kind of interaction
between adjunct modification and coordinate structure constitutes a
severe contraindication to the BMS treatment of adjuncts, hence of
adjunct extraction and of extraction in general. The data in question
are sentences displaying cumulative scoping over coordinations, such as
(1) Robin came in, grabbed a chair, sat down and whipped off her
logging boots in fifteen seconds flat.
(2) In how many seconds flat did Robin find a chair, sit down and whip
off her logging boots?
I show that under the BMS analysis, there is no way these sentences
can be licensed under the normal (and for many speaker the exclusive)
reading in which the adjunct applies to the whole complex event rather
than to any particular conjunct. The requirement that adjuncts be
selected by lexical heads, in combination with the fact that each
adjuncts so selected refers in its own description to specific
properties of the head that selects, turns out to make it impossible
to provide a consistent description of the adjuncts---which I show
must be treated as fillers in both (1) and (2)---which satisfies the
connectivity properties BMS assume as part of the filler/gap
relation. Treatment of adjuncts as unselected adjoined sisters of
phrasal heads, on the other hand, immediately yields an empirically
satisfactory, almost trivial account of case such as (1) and (2), and
so emerges as clearly preferable to the BMS approach. If time permits,
I will also sketch a novel encoding of CONTENT specifications in which
psoa-types include both lambda abstraction and structured meanings,
whereby the treatment of adjuncts as actually adjoined yields a
completely satisfactory, elegant account of the Japanese and Dutch
adjunct scoping facts that BMS believe gives their postion crucial
support.
If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact:
Frederik Fouvry
This seminar series is jointly organized by the Department of
Computational Linguistics and Phonetics and the European Post-Graduate
College in Language Technology and Cognitive Systems.
A current version of the program for this term can be found at:
http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/colloquium/
Contact
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Uwe Brahm, 04/12/2007 12:11 -- Created document.