The phonological feature [±stress] distinguishes between strong pronouns (which are capitalized here and henceforth) and others. The semantic feature [±animate] distinguishes between what I call unstressed pronouns and weak pronouns (cf. Cardinaletti & Starke (1996)). The phonological feature [±reduced] distinguishes between weak pronouns and reduced pronouns; the only reduced pronoun in Standa...

It has long been argued that incorporating a notion of discontinuity in phrase-structure is desirable, given phenomena such as topicalization and extraposition, and particular features of languages such as cross-serial dependencies in Dutch and the German Mittelfeld. Up until recently this was mainly a theoretical topic, but advances in parsing technology have made treebank parsing with discont...

We describe a new method to convert English constituent trees using the Penn Treebank annotation style into dependency trees. The new format was inspired by annotation practices used in other dependency treebanks with the intention to produce a better interface to further semantic processing than existing methods. In particular, we used a richer set of edge labels and introduced links to handle...

O. Abstract 1 This paper will explore and discuss the less obvious ways syntactic structure is used to convey information and how this information could be used by a natural language database system as a heuristic to organize and search a discourse space. The primary concern of this paper will be to present a general theory of processing which capitalizes on the information provided by such non...

In machine translation, we must consider the difference in expression between languages. For example, the active/passive voice may change in Japanese-English translation. The same verb in Japanese may be translated into different voices at each translation because the voice of a generated sentence cannot be determined using only the information of the Japanese sentence. Machine translation syst...

Construction grammar, or constructionist approaches more generally, emphasize the function of particular constructions as well as their formal properties. Constructions vary in their degree of generality, from words to idioms to more abstract patterns such as argument structure constructions, topicalization, and passive. There is also no division drawn between semantics and pragmatics, as all c...

The core notion of modern Universal Grammar is that language ability requires abstract representation in terms of hierarchy, movement operations, abstract features on words, and fixed mapping to meaning. These mental structures are a step toward integrating representational knowledge of all kinds into a larger model of cognitive psychology. Examining first and second language at once provides c...

Recently introduced Applicative Abstract Categorial Grammars (AACG) extend the Abstract Categorial Grammar (ACG) formalism to make it more suitable for semantic analyses while preserving all of its benefits for syntactic analyses. The surface form of a sentence, the abstract (tecto-) form, as well as the meaning are all uniformly represented in AACG as typed terms, or trees. The meaning of a se...

We show that reduced personal argument pronouns in Dutch and German surface in a proper subset of the positions accessible to full argument DPs. Therefore, we argue for a unified syntactic analysis, which takes both types of DPs to be subject to the same phrase structural principles and the same positioning rules, namely, XP-scrambling and XP“topicalization.” Our argument rests a.o.t. on the ob...

In contrast, a state-of-the-art natural language generation (NLG) system would likely be able to produce only one of them, modulo variations introduced by, for example, passivization, topicalization, or pronominalization. The problem is not simply to choose among paraphrases, but to be able to produce them to start with. In this book, an extended version of his dissertation, Stede provides the ...