LFG BULLETIN
July 2012
** Please send
bulletin items to me by email **
** <
Louise.Mycock "at" gmail "dot" com >**
Next issue:
September 2012
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LFG website:
http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/external/LFG/
International
Lexical Functional Grammar Association:
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/lfg/ilfga/
More about LFG:
http://www.carleton.ca/~asudeh/LFG/more.txt
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*
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CONTENTS
1. Remembering Yehuda
Falk
2. LFG 2012
Conference, Udayana University, Bali, Indonesia
3. LFG Bibliography
4. Drafts for
comments
5. Recent LFG work
6. Boilerplate
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1. REMEMBERING
YEHUDA FALK
It was with great
sadness that the LFG community learnt of the recent passing of Professor Yehuda
Falk.
From Joan Bresnan:
Remembering Yehuda
Falk
I first met Yehuda
Falk when he entered graduate school in linguistics at MIT in the early 1980s.
He had studied with Ray Jackendoff as an undergraduate at Brandeis University. While
still a young graduate student, he made several brilliant contributions to
syntactic theory (Falk 1983a,b, and 1984). His proposed theory factoring apart
linear order and dominance relations in constituent structure (1983a) was a
major advance, adopted in various syntactic frameworks including GPSG, LFG, and
GB. He also contributed a major study of the English auxiliary system, which
was published in the journal Language (1984). In this study he argued
persuasively for a mixed analysis of English auxiliaries as complement-taking
verbs and analytical exponents of tense, and he also proposed the first functional
category at the clause level, again anticipating developments in syntactic
theory by a number of years. I left MIT for Stanford before Yehuda Falk
embarked on his dissertation. It was a delight to renew our acquaintance in
1998 at the LFG conference in Brisbane, Australia, where he gave a paper. Since
then he became a frequent contributor to LFG, giving conference presentations
in 2000 (Berkeley), 2001 (Hong Kong), 2002 (Athens), 2003 (Saratoga Springs), 2004
(Christchurch), 2005 (Bergen), 2006 (Konstanz), 2007 (Stanford), 2009
(Cambridge), 2010 (Ottawa), and 2011 (Hong Kong), where I last spoke with him. He
was the moderator of the LFG list since 1999. In 1999–2000 I sponsored
his sabbatical visit to Stanford University, where he came with his wife
Brandel and three tall sons Elihu, Matityahu, and Gavriel. His daughter Pnina
was not yet born.
At one time Yehuda remarked
that he was the only linguist in Israel working on LFG. But he was not an
isolate so much as a bridge between different linguistic schools. In the entire
LFG community and the ILFGA, Yehuda Falk was one of the few who did comparative
syntactic theorizing engaging the Chomskyan paradigm, thereby playing a very
important role in theoretical cross-fertilization and communication, one which
was invaluable for students particularly, as well as for researchers with
broader perspectives in syntax. Some of his works which evidence this quality
include Resumptive Pronouns in LFG' (Falk 2002), Pivots and the Theory of
Grammatical Functions' (Falk 2000), and especially his textbook (Falk 2001). This
book contains a number of original analyses and theoretical developments not
published elsewhere and develops a coherent core of English syntax, including
an extensive and persuasive discussion of infinitival constructions and
relative clauses in LFG.
Yehuda Falk's
research addressed central and classic problems in syntax — the limits of
clause structure, the typology of agreement and case marking, extractions and
related dependencies, and the nature of categories (the latter especially in
Falk 2004, 2007) — within the LFG formal architecture making use of unification,
structure-sharing, and parallel correspondence. His technical mastery of this
architecture was superb, and his ability to express intuitive generalizations
in an appropriate formal architecture, of the highest quality. There are many
linguists who do not really understand the formalisms they use; they practice a
kind of magical thinking about formalism, as Ron Kaplan once put it. Yehuda
Falk understood.
At the LFG
conference in Saratoga Springs in 2003 I heard Yehuda present The English Auxiliary
System Revisited'. I thought it was a masterful synthesis of new evidence and
theory, arguing for a mixed system and comparing his approach with rival
contemporary proposals (including HPSG). I was also impressed by his manner of
presentation; the paper was given with great clarity and charm, delightfully
easy to follow even in the intricacies of argument. I recalled his interest in
acting in musicals.
Who would guess that
Yehuda was not only a great lover of Broadway musicals, but also a performer in
them (in Hebrew)? Yehuda's star-sprinkled webpage displays his passion for
Broadway and also reveals (less surprisingly) that he was a Trekkie. On those
pages you will see his bibliography which I have referred to above, very
selectively. And there too are a few biographical paragraphs about his parents
and his motivations for migrating from New York, where he was born, to Israel.
Most of the LFG
community met Yehuda when he was a man with a full beard and a strict religious
practice. To me, Yehuda was always this boy from Brandeis, one of my first
students, very clever, very curious. His sweetness and kindness were lifelong.
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2. LFG 2012
CONFERENCE, UDAYANA UNIVERSITY, BALI, INDONESIA
This year's
conference took place 28 June-1 July 2012 at Udayana University, Bali,
Indonesia. The full program and abstracts can be viewed on the conference
website.
http://chl.anu.edu.au/linguistics/projects/ical-lfg/
Thursday, 28 June
09:30 - 10:15 Melanie
Seiss: Lexical Semantics of Murrinh-Patha Complex Predicates: Qualia Structure
and Beyond
10:15 - 11:00 Mark
Dras, Franois Lareau, Benjamin Brschinger, Robert Dale, Yasaman Motazedi, Owen
Rambow, Myfany Turpin and Morgan Ulinski: Complex Predicates in Arrernte
11:30 - 12:15 Adam
Przepirkowski and Agnieszka Patejuk: On case assignment and the coordination
of unlikes: The limits of distributive features
12:15 - 13:00 Adam Przepirkowski
and Agnieszka Patejuk: The puzzle of case agreement between numeral phrases and
predicative adjectives in Polish
14:00 - 15:00 Miriam
Butt: Questions in Urdu/Hindi: Moving beyond Movement
15:30 - 16:15 Louisa
Sadler and Maris Camilleri: On the Analysis of Extra-Argumental Datives in
Maltese
16:15 - 17:00 Gyrgy
Rkosi: Non-core PPs are adjuncts
17:00 - 17:45 Stefano
Quaglia: On Apparently Argument-Structure-Changing Spatial Particles in Italian
Friday, 29 June
09:00 - 09:45 Helge
Lodrup: Is there a 'third object'? Searching a nominal counterpart to COMP
09:45 - 10:30 Maia
Andrasson: Constraints on full NP object shift and pronominal object shift in
Scandinavian
11:00 - 11:45 Doug
Arnold and Louisa Sadler: Affected Experiencers and Mixed Semantics in LFG/Glue
11:45 - 12:30 Sebastian
Sulger: Differential Subject Marking and the Stage/Individual Contrast in
Hindi/Urdu
14:00 - 14:45 Ash
Asudeh and Gianluca Giorgolo: Flexible Composition for Optional and Derived
Arguments
14:45 - 15:30 Gianluca
Giorgolo and Ash Asudeh: Missing Resources in a Resource-Sensitive Semantics
16:00 - 16:30 Yvette
Graham: Deep Syntax in Statistical Machine Translation
16:30 - 17:00 Liselotte
Snijders: Constraints on the discontinuity of prepositional phrases in Latin:
an exception to Economy of Expression
17:00 - 17:30 Karen
Park: The Selective Properties of Verbs in Reflexive Constructions
Saturday, 30 June
09:00 - 09:45 Kersti
Brjars, Pauline Harries and Nigel Vincent: Grammaticalising by growing
syntactic structure: the history of North Germanic nominal morphosyntax
09:45 - 10:30 Nadine
Theiler and Gerlof Bouma: Two for the Price of One: An LFG treatment of
sentence initial object es in German
11:00 - 11:45 Franois
Lareau, Mark Dras and Benjamin Brschingerr: The implementation of lexical
functions in XLE
11:45 - 12:30 Agnieszka
Patejuk and Adam Przepirkowski: Agreement in an XLE grammar of Polish
14:00 - 14:45 Yvette
Graham and Josef van Genabith: Exploring the Parameter Space in Statistical
Machine Translation via F-structure Transfer
14:45 - 15:30 Dag
Haug: From dependency grammar to LFG representations
16:00 - 17:30 POSTER
SESSION
Paul Meurer: INESS-Search:
A search system for LFG (and other) treebanks
Hyun Jong Hahm: Word
Order and Agreement in American Sign Language (ASL)
One-Soon Her and
Dun-Hong Deng: Lexical Mapping in Yami Verbs
Petr Homola and Matt
Coler: Machine Translation Using Dependency Representation
Tina Bgel: Further
investigations into the role of prosody in the parallel architecture
Owen Edwards: Non-Subject
Participants in Tolaki
Cheikh Bamba Dione: An
LFG Approach To Wolof Cleft Constructions
Anna Kibort: Participles,
adjectives, and the role of argument structure
Ansu Berg, Rigardt
Pretorius and Laurette Pretorius: Exploring the treatment of selected
typological characteristics of Tswana in LFG and XLE
Sunday, 1 July
09:00 - 09:45 Dag
Haug and Tatiana Nikitina: The many cases of non-finite subjects: The challenge
of "dominant" participles
09:45 - 10:30 Tibor
Laczko: On the (Un)Bearable Lightness of Being an LFG Style Copula in Hungarian
11:00 - 11:45 Alex
Alsina and Boban Arsenijevic: Hierarchies and competing generalizations in
Serbo-Croatian hybrid agreement
11:45 - 12:30 Agnieszka
Patejuk and Adam Przepirkowski: Lexico-semantic coordination in Polish
14:00 - 17:00 WORKSHOP
ON NUMBER AND PLURALS
Mary Dalrymple: Number
marking: An LFG overview
I Wayan Arka: Verbal
number, argument number and plural events in Marori
Rachel Nordlinger: Number
marking in the Daly River languages
Bill Palmer: Plural
in Meso-Melanesian
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3. LFG BIBLIOGRAPHY
From Meladel
Mistica, LFG Bibliographer:
The LFG bibliography
has been updated - it has items from LFG2011. Also if people would like to
check it for their publications and send me updates, that'd be super!!
http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/~mmistica/bibliography.html
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4. DRAFTS FOR
COMMENTS
'Drafts for
comments' offers bulletin readers the opportunity to submit information about
drafts or projects on which they would like to receive comments from the
community. This brings work in progress to the attention of the community and
plays some of the role that previous incarnations of the archive played.
Please submit basic
article/project information and a) a URL if the item is available online or
else b) your contact email.
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5. RECENT LFG WORK
Send details of your
recent work to < Louise.Mycock "at" gmail "dot" com >
5.1 PUBLICATIONS
Ahmed, Tafseer,
Miriam Butt, Annette Hautli and Sebastian Sulger 2012. A Reference Dependency
Bank for Analyzing Complex Predicates. Proceedings of the Eighth International
conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), May, Istanbul.
Hautli, Annette, Sebastian Sulger and Miriam
Butt 2012. Adding an Annotation Layer to the Hindi/Urdu Treebank. Linguistic
Issues in Language Technology (LiLT) 7.
Wedekind, Juergen
& Ronald Kaplan (to appear). LFG generation by grammar specialization.
Computational Linguistics, Vol 38 Number 4.
5.2 PHD/MASTERS
Pate, David R. 2012.
Second Position Clitics and Subordinate 'tshe' clauses in Pashto. MA thesis,
Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics, Dallas, TX.
http://www.gial.edu/images/theses/pate_david-thesis.pdf
5.3 CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
LFG conference
papers are available electronically at:
http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/LFG/
5.4 DOWNLOADABLE LFG
PAPERS
A list of web-pages
where people post downloadable LFG papers:
http://arts.anu.edu.au/linguistics/LFG/
Additional
suggestions welcome.
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6. BOILERPLATE
The boilerplate
(standard text) which previously appeared at the end of every bulletin can be
accessed at:
http://www.carleton.ca/~asudeh/LFG/more.txt
The LFG website also
serves much of the same function as the boilerplate section.
http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/external/LFG/
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