Locative inversion (LI) is a construction that is very prominent in Bantu languages. It involves inversion of a locative with the logical ⁄ thematic subject. The inversion is accompanied by a reversal of grammatical functions whereby the locative becomes the subject. LI is associated with a special discourse function, that of presentational focus. Within Bantu there is quite some variation, esp...

The paper introduces a dependency-based grammar and the associated parser and focusses on the problem of determinism in parsing and recovery from errors. First, it is shown how dependency-based parsing can be afforded, by taking into account the suggestions coming from other approaches, and the preference criteria for parsing are briefly addressed. Second, the issues of the interconnection betw...

This paper discusses the implementation of a knowledge-rich approach to automatic acquisition of grammatical information. Our study is based on Word Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff and Tudgell 2002). The original claims of WSE are two folded: that linguistic generalizations can be automatically extracted from a corpus with simple collocation information provided that the corpus is large enough; and t...

Van der Velde & de Kamps’ model encodes complex word-to-word relations in sentences, but does not encode the hierarchical constituent structure of sentences, a fundamental property of most accounts of sentence structure. We summarize what is at stake, and suggest two ways of incorporating constituency into the model. We are impressed by van der Velde & de Kamps’ attempt to take seriously the ch...

Based on Krifka (1992) and de Kuthy (2000), this paper develops an architecture for complex topic-comment structures in HPSG and applies it to predicate fronting in English with the goal of capturing the insights of Ward (1988) on this construction. We argue that predicate fronting is a distributed constructional form consisting of an auxiliary occurring in a predicate preposing phrase. The use...

We present type logical grammar of left extraction with attention to islands coordination and parasitic gaps We consider implementation in proof nets The account suggests a measure of the semigrammaticality of island violations Data Coordination might be thought a test for constituency but it is possible to coordinate elements which are non constituents on most any theory Consider for example R...

It is already known that parallel multiple context-free grammar (PMCFG) [1] is an instance of the equivalent formalisms simple literal movement grammar (sLMG) [2,3] and range concatenation grammar (RCG) [4,5]. In this paper we show that by adding the single operation of intersection, borrowed from conjunctive grammar [6], PMCFG becomes equivalent to sLMG and RCG. As a corollary we get that PMCF...

It seems a fact that movement dependencies come in two flavours: ”A” and ”A-bar”. Over the years, a number of apparently independent properties have been shown to cluster together around this distinction. However, the basic structural property relating these two kinds of movement, the ban on improper movement (‘once you go bar, you never go back’), has never been given a satisfactory explanatio...

Abductive reasoning is used in a bidirectional framework for syntactic realization and semantic interpretation. The use of the framework is illustrated in a case study of sentence generation, where different syntactic forms are generated depending on the status of discourse information. Examples are given involving three different syntactic constructions in German root clauses. 1 Pragmatics in ...

Parsli is a finite-state (FS) parser which can be tailored to the lexicon, syntax, and semantics of a particular application using a hand-editable declarative lexicon. The lexicon is defined in terms of a lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar, which is subsequently mapped to a FS representation. This approach gives the application designer better and easier control over the natural language unders...