Re: OT: THEORY Fusion Grammar

On Fri, 14 Jul 2006 13:22:05 -0700, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:
[...]
>Hypothesis: For any natural language, related elements
>are always immediately adjacent and there exists a
>complete fusion grammar for that language.
>
>Comments? Counterexamples?
>From a formal language theory point of view, the set of languages with
fusion grammars (without transposition) seems to be equal to the set of
context-free languages.  So how about examples of non-context-free behaviour
in natural language?

For example, a quick Google turns up
  http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~michael/esslli2004/flt.pdf
containining a potential English counterexample:

| * Bar-Hillel and Shamir (1960):
|   - English contains copy-language
|   - cannot be context-free
| * Consider the sentence
|     John, Mary, David, ... are a widower, a widow, a widower, ...,
|       respectively.
| * Claim: the sentence is only grammatical under the condition that
|   if the nth name is male (female) then the nth phrase after the
|   copula is a widower (a widow)

How would you handle this, having for instance 'male noun (phrase)' and
'female noun (phrase)' tags?  On the other hand, the counterargument is
later offered that "crossing dependencies triggered by _respectively_ are
semantic rather than syntactic"; so maybe this is a non-issue.

But then there's this Dutch (again!) example:
| dat  Jan Marie Pieter Arabisch laat zien schrijven
| THAT JAN MARIE PIETER ARABIC   LET  SEE  WRITE
| 'that Jan let Marie see Pieter write Arabic'

How do you handle this?

>From another message:
> In this case (where Mary's might be a possesive or it
> might be a contraction of "Mary is") both cases are
> developed in parallel. The 's would be expanded as
> both "Mary is" and "Mary OWNEROF" (where "OWNEROF" is
> a sort of internal possesive particle).
Why treat these as contractions, and expand them?  Why not just say there
are two words "Mary's", with tag types 'SV' (for "Mary is") and whatever
type "Mary OWNEROF" is?

On Fri, 14 Jul 2006 21:29:42 -0700, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:
>--- Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
>
>> Gary Shannon wrote:
>>
>> > Hypothesis: For any natural language, related
>> elements
>> > are always immediately adjacent and there exists a
>> > complete fusion grammar for that language.
>> >
>> > Comments? Counterexamples?
>> >
>>
>> Did you want counterexamples from English?
>>
>> (did ... want)
>
>We need to keep in mind the the actual role played by
>each word. In this sentence the word "did" functions
>as a query-marking particle (tag:QMP) with the literal
>meaning: "Is the following statement true?"
[...]
>In the case of "did you want", transposition results
>in "you did want" which has an entirely different
>meaning since (did want) puts "want" into the past and
>destroys the query nature of the sentence. With the
>wall placed between "did" and "want", e.g. "did |
>want" that erroneous fusion is forbidden.
>
>The fact that the deep meaning of "did" changes
>radically with that transposition suggests that
>transposition rules cannot be applied in this case,
>and that interpreting "did" as a query-marking
>particle that properly belongs at the front of the
>query, rather than a past tense marker, is reasonable.
But "did you want counterexamples from English?" has past tense as well.
Compare "Do you want...?" and its counterpart "you (do) want...", which
don't.  All the varying placement is really changing is the illocutionary
force, from an assertion to a question.

If "did" is a query-marking particle, how do you account for the behaviour
of auxiliary verbs, which appear moved to the same position in questions?
"Can you come?"  "Will you come?"

>From the snippage:
> Then we parse the marked statement:
>
> (((you want).SV counterexamples).SVO (from
> English)).SVO
It's interesting that you consider the verb to bind more tightly to the
subject than the object.  Mainstream syntax would have the V bind more
tightly to the O: (you (want counterexamples)).

In any case, whatever you let the verb fuse with, you'll have trouble
handling at least one of the word orders SOV (if V fuses to S) or VSO (if V
fuses to O).  Does this call for a transposition rule?

Alex

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