Re: "Self-Segregating Syntax"?

Thank you for your informative and helpful reply.

On Sun, 23 Apr 2006 17:15:32 +0100, And Rosta <and.rosta@...> wrote:

>Eldin Raigmore, On 21/04/2006 19:57:
[snip]

>> I wish I could see it in operation;
>
>It operates only in my head...
Too bad about the "only".

>No doubt I could fetch examples out of
>my head, though...
Good.  I will eventually try to ask for some.

>> also I'd like a little more detail about the generalities of
>> your techniques you mentioned above.
>
>I'm not sure exactly what you're asking for. Give me some idea about
>what counts as "details about the generalities", and I will endeavour
>to oblige...
I'll have to do this later. (** See below)
Thanks for the invitation.

>> What is Dependency Grammar, exactly? and what publications describe it
>> best? and can you detail a little better, perhaps with some examples, why
>> it helps out on this question?
>
>Some quick googling reveals online expositions to be surprisingly sparse.
>The first few paragraphs of
http://www.ilc.cnr.it/EAGLES96/synlex/node15.html
>have a little.
Thanks.  Tesniere and valency are involved, are they?  That helps.

BTW now might be the time, here might be the place, and you might be the
person to ask about something that has almost bugged me for a little while.

In LTAG (Lexical Tree-Adjoining Grammar) and in Dependency Grammar and a
few others, what seems to be the "head" of a phrase-or-whatever is the word
or lexeme or whatever constituent which actually ties its complement(s) --
all of the "dependents" -- together into a single "tagmeme" (is that a
correct use of that term?)

But in X-bar theory and a few others like it, the "head" of a phrase-or-
whatever is that constituent which, taken alone, would serve the same
function as the entire phrase.

E.g. in Categorial Grammar, the adjective "red" is an operator which:
* takes a single NP as its only input;
* produces a NP as its output; and
* occurs just to the left of its only operand.

So in the noun-phrase "red dog", Dependency Grammar would make "red" the
head and "dog" the dependent, IIUC.

However, in any sentence of which "red dog" is a constituent, the
phrase "red dog" can be replaced by the single word "dog" without ruining
its grammaticality, nor even doing great violence to its meaning.
Therefore in X-bar theory, the phrase "red dog" has "dog" as its head --
not "red".

If I am wrong about there being two meanings to the term "head", then, what
do you call the "active" constituent of a phrase -- the "operator" rather
than the "operands" -- in Dependency Grammar?

>Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_grammar, a version of
>DG, which is actually closer to current Livagian syntax (in which the
>mother--daughter asymmetry is actually redundant). Googling shows that DG
>is especially popular with people doing parsing, because it lends itself
>to simple algorithms & does away with lots of representational cruft.
>
>To get a sense of a fairly comprehensively worked out DG of English, I
>recommend Word Grammar (-- which is the theory I grew up in and is
>ancestral to what I currently do (professionally, I mean, not
>conlinguistically)).
>An into page:
>http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/wg.htm
>Intro page to a Word Grammar encyclopedia:
>http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/enc-gen.htm
>Syntax section of the encyclopedia [I recommend a browse through this]:
>http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/enc/syntax.htm
>
>I'm not aware of any book treatments of DG that are good enough to warrant
>you seeking them out in the library. That's really because there's not
>much to DG, since it is (largely) a notational variant of phrase structure
>grammar.
The URLs above are very interesting and very helpful.

>>In Category Grammar, which I understand is "equivalent", somehow, to
>>Tree-Adjoining Grammar,
>
>"Categorial Grammar"? (There is also a version of Systemic Grammar called
>"Scale and Category Grammar", but this doesn't sound like what you're
>describing.)
No, you're right; see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorial_grammar

(I no longer trust wikipedia about definitions of linguistic terminology;
but this particular article appears accurate.)

Or see
http://web.cs.mun.ca/~ulf/gloss/pling.html

or any of the first hundred-and-twenty Google hits on "categorial grammar".

>>a member of a non-elementary category is an operator that intakes a
>>fixed-length list of fixed-position operands, each of a particular
>>previously-defined category, and outputs a member of some
>>previously-defined category.
>
>This is broadly how DG works.
Good!  I think I might've, sort-of, gotten it.  Thanks.

[snip]

>>The position that the operator takes among its operands, is part of the
>>definition of the operator-type; as is the number of its operands, and as
>>are the types of its operands.
>>It sounds like you're saying that in your conlangs these facts about the
>>operator-type are always "phonologically coded" into the word for a
>>particular operator.
>>Have I understood you?
>
>Pretty much.
Good.  Thanks.

>They're not necessarily directly phonologically coded (e.g. with a
>morpheme meaning "has 3 operands"), but
>the phonological form serves as the
>address
I think this "addressing" process may be one of those "details about
generalities" I would appreciate enjoying an explanation of.

>for an entry in the lexicon, and the lexical entry will say
>"has 3 operands".
>
>None of my syntaxes have ever bothered with encoding the type of the
>operands.
Out of the data I mentioned, they encoded at most the number of operands?

>Of the three syntaxes I described above, the first had operators
>always before the first operand, and the operator encoded the number of
>operands.
I got that one.

>The second had the operator (still encoding the number of
>operands) freely ordered relative to the operands, but encoded on
>the operand its relation to the operator).
I have trouble thinking that would work.

It should be possible to feed an operand into several different operator-
types.
Also it should be possible to feed an operand into more than one position
in some operator-types.

It seems unworkable to code, on the operand, which operators it can feed
and/or which positions of them it can feed.

Otherwise the word "dog" in the phrase "red dog" would be a separate
lexicon entry from the word "dog" in the phrase "dog and cat".

>And in the current, all operators have two operands and follow their
>operands, so only simple operatorhood needs to be encoded.
That's a little weird for a different reason; aren't there some naturally
and necessarily unary operators?

Mathematically I think it's provable (but not by me!) that you don't need
n-ary operators for n>4; and of course most natlangs get by just fine
without n-ary operators for n>3, and many of them get by without n-ary
operators for n>2.  Also, many languages get by without 0-ary operators.
But I think it's a universal, or a near-universal, that "every" (almost
every?) language has 1-ary and 2-ary operators.  You might be able
to "fake" a unary operator
f(x)
by always coding it as one of
"f(x,x)"
or
"f(x,dummy)"
or
"f(dummy,x)".
But otherwise, I think you have to have unary operators.

>--And.
Thank you, very much.  This has been illuminating; as is the usual way of
things, getting my questions answered makes me think of more questions.

I hope you find time to answer.

** When I get my questions straight, I'll write to you again.

---

eldin

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