Animacy is highly correlated with a number of other linguistic concepts, such as transitivity, agentivity, topicality and discourse salience. A key generalisation or tendency is that prominent grammatical features tend to attract other prominent features; subjects, for instance, will tend to be animate and agentive, whereas objects prototypically are inanimate and themes/patients. Exceptions to...

In a series of recent investigations of language change, a group of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere has described the grammatical character and time course of a number of gradual syntactic changes in various European languages.[1] In all of these cases, the languages undergoing change exhibit variation in areas of grammar where we do not find optionality in stable sy...

This article presents a developmental pathway for the acquisition of morphosyntactic variation. Although there is abundant evidence that variation pervasive among adults, much less known about how children acquire such The literature thus far indicates development involves first producing only one variable forms (Step 1), both but in mutually-exclusive contexts 2), then some overlapping linguis...

This paper aims to highlight morphosyntactic discrepancies encountered in representing the adjective equivalent in African WordNet, with reference to Northern Sotho. Northern Sotho is an agglutinating language with rich and productive morphology. The language also features a disjunctive orthographic system. The orthography determines the attachment selection of morphemes. The immediate issue, i...

In a canonical inflectional paradigm, inflectional affixes mark distinctions in morphosyntactic value, while the lexical stem remains invariant. But stems are known to alternate too, constituting a system of inflectional marking operating according to parameters which typically differ from those of the affixal system, and so represent a distinct object of inquiry. Cross-linguistically, we still...

This paper describes a two-phase Turkish dependency parsing which separates dependency and labeling into two similar to (McDonald et al., 2006b). First, in order to solve the long distance dependency attachment problem, the sentences are split into constituents and the dependencies are estimated on shorter sentences. Later, for better estimation of labels, Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) are u...

In this paper we present a new approach to morphosyntactic tagging of Polish by bringing together Conditional Random Fields and tiered tagging. Our proposal also allows to take advantage of a rich set of morphological features, which resort to an external morphological analyser. The proposed algorithm is implemented as a tagger for Polish. Evaluation of the tagger shows significant improvement ...

State-of-the-art pronoun interpretation systems rely predominantly on morphosyntactic contextual features. While the use of deep knowledge and inference to improve these models would appear technically infeasible, previous work has suggested that predicate-argument statistics mined from naturally-occurring data could provide a useful approximation to such knowledge. We test this idea in several...

The aim of this paper is to propose a method of simulating – in a syntactico-semantic parser – the behaviour of semantic roles in case of a language that has no resources such as VerbNet of FrameNet, but has relatively rich morphosyntax (here: Polish). We argue that using an approximation of semantic roles derived from syntactic (grammatical functions) and morphosyntactic (grammatical cases) fe...

The Universal Dependencies (UD) project aims to create the unified annotation schemes across languages. With its own annotation principles and abstract inventory for parts of speech, morphosyntactic features and dependency relations, UD aims to facilitate multilingual parser development, crosslingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. This paper provides the de...