Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism).
This book presents an in-depth description of information structure in Isthmus Zapotec, an Otomanguean language spoken by around 50,000 people in southeastern Oaxaca, Mexico, and represents the first book-length treatment of information structure in a Mesoamerican language. Three main observations motivate the study: Strong documentation and a relatively large and active speaker community create a unique opportunity to document information structure in Isthmus Zapotec and to study the language as it is used by speakers in everyday life; As a tonal and verb-initial language, the examination of Isthmus Zapotec represents a chance to explore the possible combinations of tone, intonation, morphology and verb-initial syntax that may occur in the coding of information structure. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.
This book focuses on the role size plays in grammar. Under the umbrella term size fall the size of syntactic projections, the size of feature content, and the size of reference sets. The contributions in this first volume discuss size and structure building. The most productive research program in syntax where size plays a central role revolves around clausal complements. Part 1 of Volume I contributes to this program with papers that argue for particular structures of clausal complements, as well as papers that employ sizes of clausal complements to account for other phenomena. The papers in Part 2 of this volume explore the interaction between size and structure building beyond clausal complements, including phenomena in CP, vP, and NP domains. The contributions cover a variety of languages, many of which are understudied. The book is complemented by Volume II which discusses size effects in movement, agreement, and interpretation.
What is a language? What do scientific grammars tell us about the structure of individual languages and human language in general? What kind of science is linguistics? These and other questions are the subject of Ryan M. Nefdt's Language, Science, and Structure. Linguistics presents a unique and challenging subject matter for the philosophy of science. As a special science, its formalisation and naturalisation inspired what many consider to be a scientific revolution in the study of mind and language. Yet radical internal theory change, multiple competing frameworks, and issues of modelling and realism have largely gone unaddressed in the field. Nefdt develops a structural realist perspective on the philosophy of linguistics which aims to confront the aforementioned topics in new ways while expanding the outlook toward new scientific connections and novel philosophical insights. On this view, languages are real patterns which emerge from complex biological systems. Nefdt's exploration of this novel view will be especially valuable to those working in formal and computational linguistics, cognitive science, and the philosophies of science, mathematics, and language.
Information structure is a relatively new field to linguistics and has only recently been studied for smaller and less described languages. This book is the first of its kind that brings together contributions on information structure in Austronesian languages. Current approaches from formal semantics, discourse studies, and intonational phonology are brought together with language specific and cross-linguistic expertise of Austronesian languages. The 13 chapters in this volume cover all subgroups of the large Austronesian family, including Formosan, Central Malayo-Polynesian, South Halmahera-West New Guinea, and Oceanic. The major focus, though, lies on Western Malayo-Polynesian languages. Some chapters investigate two of the largest languages in the region (Tagalog and different varieties of Malay), others study information-structural phenomena in small, underdescribed languages. The three overarching topics that are covered in this book are NP marking and reference tracking devices, syntactic structures and information-structural categories, and the interaction of information structure and prosody. Various data types build the basis for the different studies compiled in this book. Some chapters investigate written texts, such as modern novels (cf. Djenar's chapter on modern, standard Indonesian), or compare different text genres, such as, for example, oral narratives and translations of biblical narratives (cf. De Busser's chapter on Bunun). Most contributions, however, study natural spoken speech and make use of spoken corpora which have been compiled by the authors themselves. The volume comprises a number of different methods and theoretical frameworks. Two chapters make use of the Question Under Discussion approach, developed in formal semantics (cf. the chapters by Latrouite & Riester; Shiohara & Riester). Riesberg et al. apply the recently developed method of Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) to investigate native speakers' perception of prosodic prominences and boundaries in Papuan Malay. Other papers discuss theoretical consequences of their findings. Thus, for example, Himmelmann takes apart the most widespread framework for intonational phonology (ToBI) and argues that the analysis of Indonesian languages requires much simpler assumptions than the ones underlying the standard model. Arka & Sedeng ask the question how fine-grained information structure space should be conceptualized and modelled, e.g. in LFG. Schnell argues that elements that could be analysed as "topic" and "focus" categories, should better be described in terms of 'packaging' and do not necessarily reflect any pragmatic roles in the first place. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.
An integrative approach to human cognition that encompasses the domains of language, consciousness, action, social cognition, and theory of mind that will foster cross-disciplinary conversation among linguists, philosophers, psycholinguists, neuroscientists, cognitive anthropologists, and evolutionary psychologists. Ray Jackendoff's Language, Consciousness, Culture represents a breakthrough in developing an integrated theory of human cognition. It will be of interest to a broad spectrum of cognitive scientists, including linguists, philosophers, psycholinguists, neuroscientists, cognitive anthropologists, and evolutionary psychologists. Jackendoff argues that linguistics has become isolated from the other cognitive sciences at least partly because of the syntax-based architecture assumed by mainstream generative grammar. He proposes an alternative parallel architecture for the language faculty that permits a greater internal integration of the components of language and connects far more naturally to such larger issues in cognitive neuroscience as language processing, the connection of language to vision, and the evolution of language. Extending this approach beyond the language capacity, Jackendoff proposes sharper criteria for a satisfactory theory of consciousness, examines the structure of complex everyday actions, and investigates the concepts involved in an individual's grasp of society and culture. Each of these domains is used to reflect back on the question of what is unique about human language and what follows from more general properties of the mind. Language, Consciousness, Culture extends Jackendoff's pioneering theory of conceptual semantics to two of the most important domains of human thought: social cognition and theory of mind. Jackendoff's formal framework allows him to draw new connections among a large variety of literatures and to uncover new distinctions and generalizations not previously recognized. The breadth of the approach will foster cross-disciplinary conversation; the vision is to develop a richer understanding of human nature.
Current language technology is dominated by approaches that either enumerate a large set of rules, or are focused on a large amount of manually labelled data. The creation of both is time-consuming and expensive, which is commonly thought to be the reason why automated natural language understanding has still not made its way into “real-life” applications yet. This book sets an ambitious goal: to shift the development of language processing systems to a much more automated setting than previous works. A new approach is defined: what if computers analysed large samples of language data on their own, identifying structural regularities that perform the necessary abstractions and generalisations in order to better understand language in the process? After defining the framework of Structure Discovery and shedding light on the nature and the graphic structure of natural language data, several procedures are described that do exactly this: let the computer discover structures without supervision in order to boost the performance of language technology applications. Here, multilingual documents are sorted by language, word classes are identified, and semantic ambiguities are discovered and resolved without using a dictionary or other explicit human input. The book concludes with an outlook on the possibilities implied by this paradigm and sets the methods in perspective to human computer interaction. The target audience are academics on all levels (undergraduate and graduate students, lecturers and professors) working in the fields of natural language processing and computational linguistics, as well as natural language engineers who are seeking to improve their systems.
This collection of papers is the result of the first Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language conference (CSDL) held at the University of California, San Diego. The conference brought together researchers from both 'Cognitive' and 'Functional' approaches to linguistics. The papers in this volume span a variety of topics, but the common thread running through them is the claim that semantics and discourse properties are fundamental to the understanding of language. The themes presented in the volume include an emphasis on the dynamic nature of language, the relevance of a notion of viewpoint in grammatical analysis, the role and nature of metaphor and cognitive blend, the possibility of non-derivational ways to capture relationships among constructions and the importance of lexical semantics. This volume will appeal to a wide range of linguists, echoing the theme of the conference - bringing together two diverse approaches to linguistics.
