Locality Principles In Syntax And In Parsing

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert

The theory underlying the implementation guarantees that the revision process fails with all and only garden path sentences. When the failure of the revision process is caused by the On-Line Locality Principle the parser attempts to build a different structure that violates the On- Line Locality Principle, but nevertheless satisfies the grammar. If such a structure is found, then the sentence is potentially a garden path and an appropriate message is given. With an extension of the revision process to NP-traces, some island violations can be seen as a side effect of the parsing process. Following this idea, island violations are a special kind of garden path involving traces instead of open NPs."

Parsing with Principles and Classes of Information presents a parser based on current principle-based linguistic theories for English. It argues that differences in the kind of information being computed, whether lexical, structural or syntactic, play a crucial role in the mapping from grammatical theory to parsing algorithms. The direct encoding of homogeneous classes of information has computational and cognitive advantages, which are discussed in detail. Phrase structure is built by using a fast algorithm and compact reference tables. A quantified comparison of different compilation methods shows that lexical and structural information are most compactly represented by separate tables. This finding is reconciled to evidence on the resolution of lexical ambiguity, as an approach to the modularization of information. The same design is applied to the efficient computation of long- distance dependencies. Incremental parsing using bottom-up tabular algorithms is discussed in detail. Finally, locality restrictions are calculated by a parametric algorithm. Students of linguistics, parsing and psycholinguistics will find this book a useful resource on issues related to the implementation of current linguistic theories, using computational and cognitive plausible algorithms.

No detailed description available for "An Essay on Grammar-Parser Relations".

Contents: This article summarizes and extends recent results linking deterministic parsing to observed (locality principles) in syntax. It also argues that grammatical theories based on explicit phrase structure rules are unlikely to provide comparable explanations of why natural languages are built the way they are. Originator-supplied keywords: Natural language processing; Parsing; Cognitive modeling.

The computer model. Computation and language acquisition. The acquisition model. Learning phrase structure. Learning transformations. A theory of acquisition. Acquisition complexity. Learning theory: applications. Locality principles and acquisition.

This important contribution to the Minimalist Program offers a comprehensive theory of locality and new insights into phrase structure and syntactic cartography. It unifies central components of the grammar and increases the symmetry in syntax. Its central hypothesis has broad empirical application and at the same time reinforces the central premise of minimalism that language is an optimal system. Cedric Boeckx focuses on two core components of grammar: phrase structure and locality. He argues that the domains which render syntactic processes local (such as islands, bounding nodes, barriers, and phases in all their cartographic manifestations) are better understood once reduced to, or combined with, the basic syntactic operation, Merge, and its core representation, the X-bar schema. In a detailed examination of the mechanism of phrasal projection or labelling he shows that viewing chains as X-bar phrases allows conditions on chain formation or movement to be captured. Clearly argued, accessibly written, and illustrated with examples from a wide range of languages, Bare Syntax will appeal to linguists and others interested in syntactic theory at graduate level and above.

How does a parser, a device that imposes an analysis on a string of symbols so that they can be interpreted, work? More specifically, how does the parser in the human cognitive mechanism operate? Using a wide range of empirical data concerning human natural language processing, Bradley Pritchett demonstrates that parsing performance depends on grammatical competence, not, as many have thought, on perception, computation, or semantics. Pritchett critiques the major performance-based parsing models to argue that the principles of grammar drive the parser; the parser, furthermore, is the apparatus that tries to enforce the conditions of the grammar at every point in the processing of a sentence. In comparing garden path phenomena, those instances when the parser fails on the first reading of a sentence and must reanalyze it, with occasions when the parser successfully functions the first time around, Pritchett makes a convincing case for a grammar-derived parsing theory.