LFG BULLETIN
MARCH 2007
** Please send bulletin items to me by email **
** (reverse: carleton.ca !at! ash_asudeh) **
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LFG website:
http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/LFG/
International Lexical Functional Grammar Association:
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/lfg/ilfga/
More about LFG (old boilerplate section):
http://www.carleton.ca/~asudeh/LFG/more.txt
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CONTENTS
1. Louise Mycock awarded Robins Prize by the Philological Society
2. LFG 2006 Proceedings: Table of Contents
3. LSA Linguistic Institute 2007
4. LFG at the LSA Institute
5. Recent LFG work
6. Reminder of boilerplate policy
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1. ROBINS PRIZE
From Nigel Vincent:
Louise Mycock of the University of Manchester, who before Christmas
submitted and successfully defended her PhD on an LFG approach to the
typology of constituent questions, has recently been announced as the
winner of the 4th R.H. Robins Prize awarded by the Philological
Society. This prize is awarded biennially for the best essay submitted by a
doctoral student from anywhere in the world in any area of linguistics or
philology. To qualify the winning essay must also be judged of a
sufficiently high standard to be published in the Society's Transactions.
Louise wins a cheque for £500. Her essay will appear as an article in
Transactions of the Philological Society Vol 106 (2008).
CONGRATULATIONS, LOUISE!
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2. LFG 2006 PROCEEDINGS
[Reminder: The LFG 2007 conference will be at Stanford, July 28-30]
The Proceedings for the LFG 2006 conference are nearing completion and will
appear shortly at:
http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/LFG/11/lfg06.html
The Table of Contents is:
Ahmed, Tafseer 1-13
Spatial, Temporal and Structural Usages of Urdu ko
Asudeh, Ash and Ida Toivonen 13-29
Expletives and the Syntax and Semantics of Copy Raising
Bashir, Elena 30-50
Evidentiality in South Asian Languages
Broadwell, George Aaron 51-70
Alignment, Precedence and the Typology of Pied-Piping with Inversion
Chatsiou, Aikaterini 71-90
On the Status of Resumptive Pronouns in Modern Greek Restrictive
Relative Clauses
Grzegorz Chrupala and Josef van Genabith 91-106
Improving Treebank-Based Automatic LFG Induction for Spanish
Cook, Philippa 107-123
The German Infinitival Passive: A Case for Oblique Functional Controllers?
Cook, Philippa and John Payne 124-144
Information Structure and Scope in German
Crouch, Dick and Tracy Holloway King 145-165
Semantics via F-Sructure Rewriting
Denis, Pascal and Jonas Kuhn 166-183
Applying an LFG Parser in Coreference Resolution: Experiments and Analysis
Falk, Yehuda 184-201
On the Representation of Case and Agreement
Finn, Ríona, Mary Hearne, Andy Way and Josef van Genabith 202-221
GF-DOP: Grammatical Feature Data-Oriented Parsing
Forst, Martin 222-239
COMP in (parallel) Grammar Writing
Fortmann, Christian 240-255
The Complement of verba dicendi Parentheticals
Hurst, Peter 256-274
The Syntax of the Malagasy Reciprocal Construction: An LFG Account
Kelling, Carmen 275-288
Spanish se-Constructions : The Passive and the Impersonal Construction
Kibort, Anna 289-309
On Three Different Types of Subjectlessness and how to Model them in LFG
Mayer, Elisabeth 310-327
Optional Direct Object Clitic Doubling in Limeño Spanish
Mayo, Bruce 328-342
A Computational Architecture for Lexical Insertion of Complex Nonce Words
Mittendorf, Ingo and Louisa Sadler 343-364
A Treatment of Welsh Initial Mutations
Montaut, Annie 365-385
The Evolution of the Tense-Aspect System in Hindi/Urdu: The Status of
the Ergative Alignment
Ørsnes, Bjarne 386-405
Creating Raising Verbs: An LFG Analysis of the Complex Passive in Danish
Jeeyoung Peck and Peter Sells 406-415
Preposition Incorporation in Mandarin: Economy within VP
Rákosi, György 416-436
On the Need for a More Refined Approach to the Argument-Adjunct
Distinction: The Case of Dative Experiencers in Hungarian
Sadler, Louisa and Rachel Nordlinger 437-454
Apposition as Coordination: Evidence from Australian Languages
Sells, Peter 455-473
Using Subsumption rather than Equality in Functional Control
Stephens, Nola M. 474-484
Norwegian When-Clauses
Tamm, Anne 485-504
Estonian Transitive Verbs and Object Case
Torn, Reeli 504-515
Oblique Dependents in Estonian: An LFG Perspective
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3. LSA Linguistic Institute 2007
Website: http://linginst07.stanford.edu/
The next LSA Linguistic Institute will be held from July 1-27, 2007, at
Stanford University. Presession (introductory) courses will be offered July
1-3, followed by regular session courses July 5-27. The theme of the
institute is 'Empirical Foundations for Theories of Language'. There are
far too many courses of relevance to LFG to list here; please see the
website.
The institute Director is Peter Sells and the Associate Directors are
Juliette Blevins, Eve Clark, Dan Jurafsky, Beth Levin, and Ivan Sag.
Please note the following collocated special events, in particular the LFG
and HPSG conferences:
a) INSTITUTE LECTURES:
July 10: Hale Lecture
Marianne Mithun, University of California, Santa Barbara
July 17: Collitz Lecture
Asko Parpola, University of Helsinki
July 24: Sapir Lecture
Joan Bresnan, Stanford University
b) FORUM LECTURES:
July 8: William Labov, University of Pennsylvania
July 15: Elissa Newport, University of Rochester
July 22: Harald Baayen, MPI-Nijmegen
c) SPECIAL EVENT:
July 20-22: Mini-Course on Mixed-Effects Statistical Modelling. Harald
Baayen, MPI-Nijmegen.
d) WORKSHOPS:
July 6-8: Variation, gradience and frequency in Phonology (Arto Anttila)
July 13-15:
Towards the Interoperability of Language Resources (EMELD) (Arienne Dwyer and Helen Aristar-Dry)
Grammar Engineering Across Frameworks (Emily Bender and Tracy Holloway King)
New Techniques in Sound Pattern Research (Diana Archangeli and Jeff Mielke)
July 14: Ethnographic Methods in Sociocultural Linguistics (Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall)
July 17-19: Alternative Approaches to Language Classification (Philip Baldi)
July 21: Empirical approaches to morphological case (Cathryn Donohue and Jóhanna Barddal)
July 21-22: 2nd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based
Languages (Ali Farghaly and Karine Megerdoomian)
e) CONFERENCES:
July 20-22: 14th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure
July 28-30: 12th International Lexical-Functional Grammar Conference
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4. LFG AT THE LSA INSTITUTE
The following are LFG-oriented events and courses at the 2007 LSA Institute
at Stanford that I've identified on a somewhat ad hoc basis (see note).
[Note: I haven't included everything that could potentially be 'of
interest' to LFGers, because there would be far too much -- basically
everything! Since I can't predict the exact content of courses, my general
methodology was to pick courses taught by people with a strong association
with the LFG community, based on information from the institute's web
site. My apologies if I've left anyone or anything out.]
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4.1 Conference
July 28-30: 12th International Lexical-Functional Grammar Conference
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4.2 Sapir Lecture
July 24, 7:30 PM, Kresge Auditorium: Joan Bresnan, Stanford University
* --- *
4.3 Workshops
July 13-15: Grammar Engineering Across Frameworks (Emily Bender and Tracy Holloway King)
July 25: Empirical approaches to morphological case (Cathryn Donohue and Jóhanna Barthdal)
* --- *
4.4 Presession Courses
There are a large number of courses introducing various aspects of
experimental or empirical methodology, formal and computational tools, and
various linguistic theories. See:
http://linginst07.stanford.edu/courses.html#presession
LSA.105P | Introduction to LFG
Mary Dalrymple (9:30-11:30 AM)
This course will provide an introduction to Lexical Functional Grammar, a
constraint-based, lexicalist theory of grammar. LFG assumes that different
aspects of linguistic structure are best analyzed in terms of linguistic
representations which are related by functional correspondences and whose
formal character faithfully reflects the nature of the data being
represented. After an introduction to the formal architecture and basic
concepts and tools of LFG, we will discuss the LFG treatment of a set of
representative syntactic phenomena, including long-distance dependencies
and raising/control.
Course Areas: Morphology/Syntax
* --- *
4.5 Regular Session Courses
LSA.309 | Constraint-Based Generative Syntax
Ash Asudeh, Ida Toivonen (T/F 1:30-3:30 PM)
This course examines points of convergence and divergence within
constraint-based, lexicalist theories of syntax (particularly Lexical
Functional Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar) and between
these theories and modern transformational grammar (particularly the
Minimalist Program in Principles and Parameters Theory). Our aim is an
honest assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of these different
approaches to generative grammar, hopefully with lively and substantial
discussion. Students' skills in constraint-based syntactic analysis will be
developed through problem sets. We will consider various empirical
phenomena and their theoretical consequences, higher-level theoretical
issues, and the analytic consequences of grammatical architecture. Examples
of higher-level issues are modularity, movement, empty categories,
constructions, the syntax-semantics interface, locality, and
linearization. Relevant empirical phenomena include head-argument relations
(e.g. agreement, case), local dependencies (e.g., raising, control), and
unbounded dependencies.
Course Areas: Morphology/Syntax
Prerequisites: At least an introductory syntax class; deep knowledge of
constraint-based theories is not required.
LSA.341 | Paraphrase and Usage
Annie Zaenen, Catherine O'Connor, Thomas Wasow (M/TH 10-12 PM)
Studies of grammatical alternations--variant ways of expressing the same
proposition-- give rise to questions about why speakers choose one
alternant over another. The recent availability of annotated corpora has
made possible a new approach to investigating choice within alternations
such as active/passive, dative, genitive, or dislocation constructions,
among others. Current studies reveal correlations between construction
choice and such factors as length or syntactic weight, information status,
animacy, semantics of the relevant phrasal head, and predictability. Such
studies may shed light on issues such as the theoretical significance of
probabilistic variations in linguistic form, the nature of information
structure constraints on syntactic form, and the role of processing
constraints in grammatical change. We will present current work on this
topic in lecture format; several problem sets will give students hands-on
experience with at least one major corpus and several analytical tools
currently in use. Related research focusing on lexical variants will be
covered in LSA.376, Choosing a variant: Unfree variation.
Course Areas: Empirical Methods, Language Variation, Morphology/Syntax
Prerequisites: At least one course in syntax. A course in semantics would
also be useful, but is not required.
LSA.342 | Pattern-based Models of Lexical Knowledge
Farrell Ackerman, Jim Blevins, Fermín Moscoso del Prado Martín, Michael
Tomasello (T/F 3:30-5:30 PM)
This course examines a number of mutually-reinforcing perspectives on the
role that lexical exemplars and general pattern-matching processes play in
systems of lexical and morphological knowledge. The course is designed to
span a number of traditional boundaries to highlight the recent convergence
of traditional models of morphological structure, usage-based theories of
lexical acquisition and information-theoretic approaches to lexical
processing. The first part of the course will introduce students to
traditional analyses of morphological systems in which the form variation
within a language is represented by means of sets of exemplary
patterns. The second part introduces usage-based models of lexical
acquisition and highlights the role that individual constructions and word
tokens play in lexical islands. The third part summarizes the evidence for
effects of inflectional and derivational paradigms on word recognition
response latencies and explains how psycholinguistic evidence for the
influence of lexical and morphemic paradigms on human lexical processing
argues in favor of experience-based models of the mental lexicon. In
addition, this component of the course will introduce the statistical tools
that are used for characterizing these effects and for drawing consequences
about the underlying system of knowledge.
Course Areas: Computational Linguistics, Morphology/Syntax, Language
Acquisition, Empirical Methods, Experimental Methods
Prerequisites: Introduction to morphology; Introduction to syntax.
LSA.347 | Rethinking Linguistic Competence
Joan Bresnan (T/F 10-12 PM)
Current theories of human language are widely based on the simplifying
assumptions that knowledge of language is characterized by a static,
categorical system of grammar for which grammaticality judgments offer the
richest source of evidence. This idealization has been fruitful, but it
ultimately underestimates human language capacities. Speakers of a language
have powerful predictive capabilities that enable them to anticipate the
linguistic choices of others by instantaneously weighing multiple sources
of information. Linguistic manipulations that raise or lower probability
can be shown to influence grammaticality judgments. These facts support an
alternative view of linguistic competence as inherently variable and
stochastic in nature, rather than categorical and algebraic. Even in the
adult individual, grammar is a highly plastic cognitive system sensitively
tuned to the probabilities of the environment. This course will trace
several lines of evidence for this rethinking of linguistic competence in
the domain of syntax.
Course Areas: Morphology/Syntax, Empirical Methods
LSA.373 | Introduction to Morphology
Andrew Spencer (M/TH 8-10 AM)
This course presents the principal concepts underlying contemporary work in
morphology. It emphasises realizational models, but the key ideas are
important to all aspects of morphology and all types of morphological
theory. We begin by investigating what is meant by "word", including the
concept of the lexeme, its structure, and how lexemes are related to each
other. We then turn to the kinds of inflectional systems found
cross-linguistically, paying particular attention to the notion of
syncretism. With this descriptive background, we look at paradigm-based
approaches to inflectional morphology, starting with Stump's Paradigm
Function Morphology, introducing the crucial notions
"realization/exponence" and "default", and the important but controversial
notion in such models of "stem." After a brief survey of clitic systems and
their relation to inflectional morphology, we conclude by considering the
implications of the issues raised for approaches to the morphology-syntax
interface. Throughout we approach the conceptual and theoretical ideas by
examining detailed data sets from a wide variety of language types, and
students are expected to analyse such data sets between classes.
Course Areas: Morphology/Syntax
Prerequisites: Prerequisites: Basic level linguistics (some prior knowledge
of elementary morphology will be helpful but not essential).
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5. RECENT LFG WORK
5.1 Recent and Forthcoming LFG Publications
Joan Bresnan, Ashwini Deo, and Devyani Sharma. 2006. Typology in
Variation: A Probabilistic Approach to be and n't in the Survey of English
Dialects. To appear in English Language and Linguistics.
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Dalrymple, Mary and Irina Nikolaeva. 2006. Syntax of natural and
accidental coordination: Evidence from agreement. Language 82(4):
824-849.
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6. Reminder of boilerplate policy
There has traditionally been a lot of boilerplate (standard text) at the
end of every bulletin. This has made the bulletin somewhat longer than
necessary and some of the information is becoming (I suspect) out of date.
I have moved the boilerplate to:
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/LFG/