Occasional Papers in Autolexical Grammar #1
 
Revised July 11, 2008

© by Eric Schiller. All Rights Reserved. This document may be freely distributed, if unaltered and complete, in HTML format.

The preferred reference for this document is:

Schiller, Eric (1997-99). Classes for the implementation of  Autolexical Grammar. Published on the Internet by Linguistics Unlimited, Moss Beach CA.

Objects for the implementation of Autolexical Grammar

by Eric Schiller, Linguistics Unlimited

This document contains some considerations in designing programs to implement autolexical grammar. 

Lexicon

The lexicon contains a collection of lexical items, called lexemes. Each lexeme contains information specific to the lexical entry, divided into groups which reflect the dimension to which they are relevant.

Class Lexicon is the container for the collection of lexemes.

Class Lexeme holds information about each lexical item. 

Class lexsyn holds specifications for the syntax of the lexeme

Class lexsem holds specifications for the logical semantics of the lexeme

Class lexmsx holds specifications for the morphosyntax of the lexeme

Class lexmph holds specifications for the morphophonology of the lexeme

Class lexphn holds specifications for the phonology of the lexeme

Class lexdsc holds specifications for the discourse-related aspects of the lexeme

The details of each class are available as an XML document type declaration and as Java classes.

A specific and detailed explanation of the lexicon is in the second paper in this series: The Lexicon in Autolexical Grammar.

Dimensions

Class Dimension
    private String name;     //the name of the dimension
    private Categories;        //a class of grammatical categories which are visible on the dimension
    private Grammar;        //a class of grammatical rules which apply on the dimension

The first property is the list of categories which comprise the fundamental building blocks of the dimension. In syntax, these include categories such as nouns, verbs, prepositions, etc.

The second property is the set of features which may apply to the categories. An example of a feature is a marker of gender or number. One could argue that the category is itself nothing but a bundle of features, an approach taken in many frameworks, but I prefer to distinguish the two for ease of presentation. Note that features are not necessarily, or even ordinarily, binary in nature. Most are scalar variables.

The methods of the dimension are the grammatical rules that apply in the dimension.

Categories

Each category has properties, mostly features, some of which are obligatory and some of which are optional. For example, each category in syntax must be specified for a bar-level feature and must be specified for a head feature, though the head feature may be null.

Class Category
    private String name;    //the name of the category
    private String feature;  //the list of features which apply to the category
    private char head;        //the head feature which controls the projections in the grammar, if any

Attributes

Features may be binary, multi-valued or scalar. An example of a binary feature in syntax is finiteness. An example of a multi-valued feature is bar level. An example of a scalar feature is Speaker Responsibility. An example of an enumerated feature is case.

Class Attribute
    private String name;    //the name of the feature
    private String ref;        //the abbreviation used to reference the feature
    private Value;            //the list of possible values of the feature. May be Boolean, scalar or enumerated.

Context Register

The Context Register lies outside grammar per se, but is used by the grammar. It is reasonable to assume that this, and lexical memory, are handled by normal memory and are not part of any language-specific area of the brain.

The Context Register stores information about entries and propositions, including references to real-world objects (via anaphora, for example) and any item in the context register is available for reuse via citation or paraphrase in the discourse using anaphoric means.

The form of the Context Register is a stack (last in, first out).

For example, the anaphoric device do so makes reference to a predicate phrase which is also a VP in the syntax. That predicate phrase must be in the contextual register.

Lexical Memory

Lexical memory is the actual real-world storage of the lexical items as reflected in the surfotax. These items are available for re-use in the discourse, and allow for reference to them. For example: You said "Newt is a moron" not "Newt is a fool".

The formal representation of each lexeme is its citation form in the lexicon.

Methods

The rules for each dimension are private methods within the dimension object. Public functions provide exposure of grammatical objects to the interface for those objects which need to be exposed.

Interface

The interface is invoked either during parsing or generation of utterances. It has a set of methods which compare the structural representations exposed by individual dimensions and check for compatibility. If discrepancies are found, then the interface determines whether the mismatches are allowed under the Generalized Interface Principle, which states that representations among dimensions must match to the maximum extent possible given the requirements of the lexical items involved.

Closing remarks

This document is a superficial overview of autolexical theory as implemented at Linguistics Unlimited in February of 1999. I hope to be able to expand on it in the future, but for now, it is as it is. I decided to circulate it in its current form to a select set of individuals who have sufficient familiarity with the subject matter to be able to understand it.

By placing it on my web site, I have also made it available to many people for whom the subject matter is not as familiar. Since my goal is to refine this document so that it can be understood by the computer science community and the general public, I welcome input from anyone with suggestions on how to improve it, but do wish to point out that at present it is a very terse document with few examples and explanations.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome via email at: linguist@chessworks.com

References

In general, the best way to find important autolexical papers is to examine the volumes of the Chicago Linguistics Society (CLS:.

Related to Autolexical Theory

Chelliah, Shobhana. 1989. An Autolexical account of voicing assimilation in Manipuri. In Schiller, Steinberg & Need.

Eilfort, William and Eric Schiller. 1990. "Pragmatics and Grammar: Cross-Modular Relations in Autolexical Theory." CLS 26.1. 125-136.

Faarlund, Jan Terje. 1989. "Autostructural Analysis." In Schiller, Steinberg & Need

Graczyk, Randolph. 1991. "Incorporation and Cliticization in Crow Morphosyntax." Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1991.

Kathman, David. 1992. "Control in Autolexical Syntax." In Schiller, Steinberg & Need.

Lapointe, Steven G. 1987. "Some Extensions of the Autolexical Approach to Structural Mismatches." In Syntax and Semantics, Volume 20: Discontinuous Constituency, ed. Geoffrey J. Huck and Almerindo E. Ojeda. 152-184. 20. Orlando: Academic Press, 1987.

Sadock, Jerrold M. 1983. "The necessary overlapping of grammatical components." CLS 19.2 (1983): 198-221.

Sadock, Jerrold M. 1986. "An autolexical view of pronouns, anaphora, and agreement." UCWPIL 2 (1986): 143-164.

Sadock, Jerrold M. 1985. "Autolexical Syntax: A Proposal for the Treatment of Noun Incorporation and Similar Phenomena." NLLT 3 (1985): 379-439.

Sadock, Jerrold M. 1989. Some pleasures and pitfalls of Autolexical Syntax. In Schiller, Steinberg & Need.

Sadock, Jerrold M. 1991. Autolexical Syntax: A Theory of Parallel Grammatical Representations. Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Sadock, Jerrold M. 1992 "A Paper on Yiddish for James D. McCawley." In The Joy of Grammar, ed. Diane Brentari, Gary N. Larson, and Lynn A. MacLeod. 323-328. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1992.

Sadock, Jerrold M. and Eric Schiller. "The Generalized Interface Principle" CLS 29. Schiller, Eric. 1989a. "Syntactic Polysemy and Underspecification in the Lexicon." BLS 15 (1989): 278-290.

Schiller, Eric. 1990. "Focus and the Discourse Dimension in Autolexical Theory." ESCOL 7 (1990):

Schiller, Eric. 1991. "An Autolexical Account of Subordinating Serial Verb Constructions." Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1991.

Schiller, Eric. 1992. "Infixes: Clitics at the Morphophonological Level." CLS 28:

Schiller, Eric & Barbara Need. 1992. "The Liberation of Minor Categories: Such a Nice Idea!" CLS 28.

Schiller, Eric. 1995. "Not yes, not no: The Zen of Khmer Discourse Particles. BLS 21s: 107-113.

Schiller, Eric. 1996. Performatives in Autolexical Grammar. CLS 31.

Schiller, Eric, Elisa Steinberg & Barbara Need. 1995. Autolexical Syntax: Ideas and Methods. Berlin: Mouton.

Schneider, Robinson. 1989. "Toward a tri-modular analysis of -ly adverbs." In Schiller, Steinberg & Need.

Smessaert, Hans. 1988. "An Autolexical Syntax Approach to Pronominal Cliticization in West Flemish." M.A., University of Chicago, 1988.

Smessaert, Hans. 1991. "Pronominal Cliticization in West Flemish." In Schiller, Steinberg & Need

Other useful references

Croft, William. 1991. Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations: The Cognitive Organization of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Emonds, J. A Unified Theory of Syntactic Categories. Dordrecht: Foris, 1986.

Gupta, Anil. 1980. The Logic of Common Nouns: An investigation in quantified modal logic. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Jackendoff, Ray. 1977. X-Bar Syntax: A Study of Phrase Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977.

Kornai, Andras & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 1990. "The X-bar theory of phrase structure." Language 66.1: 24-50.

Leer, Jeff. 1991. "Schetic Categories of the Tlingit Verb." Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1991.

McCawley, James D. 1988. The Syntactic Phenomena of English. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Pollard, Carl and Ivan Sag. 1988. "An Information-Based Theory of Agreement." CLS 24.2 (1988): 236-257.

Pullum, Geoffrey. "Assuming Some Version of X-Bar Theory." CLS 21 (1 1985): 323-353.

BLS = Berkeley Linguistic Society

CLS = Chicago Linguistic Society

ESCOL = Eastern States Conference on Linguistics

Credits

The ideas contained in this document were not born in a vacuum. Tremendous credit must be given to Jerry Sadock, the founder of Autolexical theory, my frequent co-author Barbara Need, David Kathman and most of the faculty and graduate students at the University of Chicago from 1985 to 1992. Still, this particular implementation cannot be blamed on them. All errors in form, content, analysis or judgment ar mine alone.

This document was created by Eric Schiller using:

Microsoft Word for Windows 97 (Microsoft Corporation)

Microsoft Access for Windows 97 (Microsoft Corporation)

Microsoft Front Page 98 (Microsoft Corporation)

Linguistics Template for Microsoft Word (Linguistics Unlimited)