To elucidate the relationships between syntactic and semantic processes, one interesting question is how syntactic structures are constructed by the argument structure of a verb, where each argument corresponds to a semantic role of each noun phrase (NP). Here we examined the effects of possessivity [sentences with or without a possessor] and canonicity [canonical or noncanonical word orders] u...

multi-word lexical units are a typical feature of specialized dictionaries, in particular monolingual and bilingual maritime dictionaries. the paper studies the concept of the multi-word lexical unit and considers the similarities and differences of their selection and presentation in monolingual and bilingual maritime dictionaries. the work analyses such issues as the classification of multi-w...

Algorithms like those for differentiating functional expressions manipulate the syntactic structure of mathematical expressions in a mathematically meaningful way. A formalization of such an algorithm should include a specification of its computational behavior, a specification of its mathematical meaning, and a mechanism for applying the algorithm to actual expressions. Achieving these goals r...

The annotations of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) include (1) discourse connectives and their arguments, and (2) attribution of each argument of each connective and of the relation it denotes. Because the PDTB covers the same text as the Penn TreeBank WSJ corpus, syntactic and discourse annotation can be compared. This has revealed significant differences between syntactic structure and dis...

Pylkkänen (2001) argues that there are two types of applicatives, which have different lexical semantics. I will show that this difference underlies the contrast between (1) and (2), and argue that the two applicatives have different syntactic ‘phase’ structures (Chomsky 1999, 2000). Phases are chunks of syntactic structure that are sent off to PF and LF for interpretation before the derivation...

Syntactic dependencies are head/modifier relations between words in a sentence that organize sentences into a syntactic tree structure. The general principle that languages have a preference to group syntactically related words close together can be made precise as a preference for shorter dependencies. We examine evidence for this principle in the development of languages’ grammars as well as ...

Canonical abstraction is a static analysis technique that represents states as 3-valued logical structures, and is able to construct finite representations of systems with infinite statespaces for verification. The granularity of the abstraction can be altered by the definition of instrumentation predicates, which derive their meaning from other predicates. We introduce shape predicates for pre...

In this paper, we propose an alternative to interlingua which can capture the analyses and generalizations that interlinguas can express, but which uses cross-linguistic semantic features rather than a separate level of representation. This alternative we call lexico-structural transfer. Lexico-structural transfer relies on the expressive power of a lexicalized syntactic representation (or “lex...

In the past seven years, Language Research Institute of Inner Mongolia University has constructed a 500,000word scale Mongolian dependency treebank. The syntactic treebank provides a favorable data platform for language research and information processing. In order to effectively use the treebank, we have designed and implemented a graphical syntactic information retrieval system based on the M...