Campus Event Calendar
Event Entry
What and Who
Focus and Higher-Order Unification
Claire Gardent
Computerlinguistisches Kolloquium
AG 1, AG 2, AG 3, INET, AG 4, AG 5, D6, RG1, SWS
AG Audience
English
Note: We use this to send email in the morning.
Date, Time and Location
Thursday, 7 December 95
16:00
60 Minutes
17.2 - Computerlinguistik
Seminarraum
Saarbrücken
Abstract
Pulman has already shown that Higher-Order Unification (HOU) could be
used for modelling the semantics and pragmatics of focus.
In this talk, I extend on this result and investigate a new range of
focus-related data namely, utterances with multiple focus
operators, secondary occurrences and certain cases of adverbial
quantification. I then show that the resulting approach favourably
compares with the corresponding linguistic theories (e.g. Rooth's
alternative semantics and Krifka's structured meanings theory) in that
it can yield interpretations that these theories cannot. In other
words, it does not undergenerate. Finally, I show that by adopting a
special form of unification i.e. colored unification (which was
originally developped in the theorem proving community), systematic
cases of over-generation that are characterisic of a basic HOU
approach, can be avoided. In particular, I show that color unification
permits a natural modelling of DSP's ``Primary Occurrence Restriction''
and that a similar restriction is necessary for focus theory.
used for modelling the semantics and pragmatics of focus.
In this talk, I extend on this result and investigate a new range of
focus-related data namely, utterances with multiple focus
operators, secondary occurrences and certain cases of adverbial
quantification. I then show that the resulting approach favourably
compares with the corresponding linguistic theories (e.g. Rooth's
alternative semantics and Krifka's structured meanings theory) in that
it can yield interpretations that these theories cannot. In other
words, it does not undergenerate. Finally, I show that by adopting a
special form of unification i.e. colored unification (which was
originally developped in the theorem proving community), systematic
cases of over-generation that are characterisic of a basic HOU
approach, can be avoided. In particular, I show that color unification
permits a natural modelling of DSP's ``Primary Occurrence Restriction''
and that a similar restriction is necessary for focus theory.
Contact
Werner Saurer
+49 (681) 302-4177
--email hidden
passcode not visible
logged in users only