In this dissertation, I examine a language with "free" word order, specifically Turkish, in order to develop a formalism that can capture the syntax and the context-dependent interpretation of "free" word order within a computational framework. In "free" word order languages, word order is used to convey distinctions in meaning that are not captured by traditional truth-conditional semantics. The word order indicates the "information structure", e.g. what is the "topic" and the "focus" of the sentence. The context-appropriate use of "free" word order is of considerable importance in developing practical applications in natural language interpretation, generation, and machine translation.
This volume is a collection of studies on various aspects of word order variation in Turkish. As a head-final, left-branching ‘free’ word order language, Turkish raises a number of significant theory-internal as well as language-particular questions regarding linearization in language. Each of the contributions in the present volume offers a fresh insight into a number of these questions, thus, while expanding our knowledge of the language-particular properties of the word order phenomena, also contribute individually to the theory of linearization in general. Turkish is a configurational language. It licenses constructions in which constituents can occur in non-canonical presubject as well as postverbal positions. Presented within the assumptions of the generative tradition, the discussion and analyses of the various aspects of the linearization facts of the language offer a novel treatment of the issues therein. The authors approach the word order phenomena from a variety of perspectives, ranging from purely syntactic treatments, to accounts as syntax-PF interface or syntax-discourse interface phenomena or as output of base generation.
This Handbook represents the development of research and the current level of knowledge in the fields of syntactic theory and syntax analysis. Syntax can look back to a long tradition. Especially in the last 50 years, however, the interaction between syntactic theory and syntactic analysis has led to a rapid increase in analyses and theoretical suggestions. This second edition of the Handbook on Syntax adopts a unifying perspective and therefore does not place the division of syntactic theory into several schools to the fore, but the increase in knowledge resulting from the fruitful argumentations between syntactic analysis and syntactic theory. It uses selected phenomena of individual languages and their cross-linguistic realizations to explain what syntactic analyses can do and at the same time to show in what respects syntactic theories differ from each other. It investigates how syntax is related to neighbouring disciplines and investigate the role of the interfaces especially the relationship between syntax and phonology, morphology, compositional semantics, pragmatics, and the lexicon. The phenomena chosen bring together renowned experts in syntax, and represent the consensus reached as to what has to be considered as an important as well as illustrative syntactic phenomenon. The phenomena discuss do not only serve to show syntactic analyses, but also to compare theoretical approaches with each other.
The study of syntax over the last half century has seen a remarkable expansion of the boundaries of human knowledge about the structure of natural language. The Routledge Handbook of Syntax presents a comprehensive survey of the major theoretical and empirical advances in the dynamically evolving field of syntax from a variety of perspectives, both within the dominant generative paradigm and between syntacticians working within generative grammar and those working in functionalist and related approaches. The handbook covers key issues within the field that include: • core areas of syntactic empirical investigation, • contemporary approaches to syntactic theory, • interfaces of syntax with other components of the human language system, • experimental and computational approaches to syntax. Bringing together renowned linguistic scientists and cutting-edge scholars from across the discipline and providing a balanced yet comprehensive overview of the field, the Routledge Handbook of Syntax is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students working in syntactic theory.
This book examines the nature of the interface between word meaning and syntax, one of the most controversial and elusive issues in contemporary linguistics. It approaches the interface from both sides of the relation, and surveys a range of views on the mapping between them, with an emphasis on lexical approaches to argument structure. Stephen Wechsler begins by analysing the fundamental problem of word meaning, with discussions of vagueness and polysemy, complemented with a look at the roles of world knowledge and normative aspects of word meaning. He then surveys the argument-taking properties of verbs and other predicators, and presents key theories of lexical semantic structure. Later chapters provide a description of formal theories and frameworks for capturing the mapping from word meaning to syntactic structure, as well as arguments in favour of a lexicalist approach to argument structure. The book will interest scholars of theoretical linguistics, particularly in the fields of syntax and lexical semantics, as well as those interested in psycholinguistics and philosophy of language.
This authoritative introduction explores the four main non-transformational syntactic frameworks: Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, and Simpler Syntax. It also considers a range of issues that arise in connection with these approaches, including questions about processing and acquisition. An authoritative introduction to the main alternatives to transformational grammar Includes introductions to three long-established non-transformational syntactic frameworks: Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar, and Categorial Grammar, along with the recently developed Simpler Syntax Brings together linguists who have developed and shaped these theories to illustrate the central properties of these frameworks and how they handle some of the main phenomena of syntax Discusses a range of issues that arise in connection with non-transformational approaches, including processing and acquisition
The two-volume set LNCS 9623 + 9624 constitutes revised selected papers from the CICLing 2016 conference which took place in Konya, Turkey, in April 2016. The total of 89 papers presented in the two volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from 298 submissions. The book also contains 4 invited papers and a memorial paper on Adam Kilgarriff’s Legacy to Computational Linguistics. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: Part I: In memoriam of Adam Kilgarriff; general formalisms; embeddings, language modeling, and sequence labeling; lexical resources and terminology extraction; morphology and part-of-speech tagging; syntax and chunking; named entity recognition; word sense disambiguation and anaphora resolution; semantics, discourse, and dialog. Part II: machine translation and multilingualism; sentiment analysis, opinion mining, subjectivity, and social media; text classification and categorization; information extraction; and applications.
This state-of-the-art guide to some of the most exciting work in current linguistics explores how the core components of the language faculty interact. It examines how these interactions are reflected in linguistic and cognitive theory, considers what they reveal about the operations of language within the mind, and looks at their reflections in expression and communication. Leading international scholars present cutting-edge accounts of developments in the interfaces between phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. They bring to bear a rich variety of methods and theoretical perspectives, focus on a broad array of issues and problems, and illustrate their arguments from a wide range of the world's languages. After the editors' introduction to its structure, scope, and content, the book is divided into four parts. The first, Sound, is concerned with the interfaces between phonetics and phonology, phonology and morphology, and phonology and syntax. Part II, Structure, considers the interactions of syntax with morphology, semantics, and the lexicon, and explores the status of the word and its representional status in the mind. Part III, Meaning, revisits the syntax-semantics interface from the perspective of compositionality, and looks at issues concerned with intonation, discourse, and context. The authors in the final part of the book, General Architectural Concerns, examine work on Universal Grammar, the overall model of language, and linguistic and associated theories of language and cognition. All scholars and advanced students of language will value this book, whether they are in linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy, artificial intelligence, computational science, or informatics.
The Acquisition of Turkish in Childhood presents recent research on the nature of language acquisition by typically and atypically developing monolingual and bilingual Turkish-speaking children. The book summarises the most recent research findings on the acquisition of Turkish in childhood, with a focus on (i) the acquisition of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, (ii) the acquisition of discourse skills, (iii) literacy development and (iv) atypical vs. typical development. The book also provides the reader with a unique perspective on cross-learner comparative research on the acquisition of Turkish, demonstrating how similar issues can be investigated in a range of various acquisition contexts. By grouping together the recent research on the acquisition of Turkish within a single volume, this book provides a unique opportunity for readers to review the general developmental tendencies and the most prominent hypotheses put forward by scholars.
The book examines to what extent the mediating relation between constituents and their semantics can arise from combinatory knowledge of words. It traces the roots of Combinatory Categorial Grammar, and uses the theory to promote a Humean question in linguistics and cognitive science: Why do we see limited constituency and dependency in natural languages, despite their diversity and potential infinity? A potential answer is that constituents and dependencies might have arisen from a single resource: adjacency. The combinatory formulation of adjacency constrains possible grammars.
