Issues in Salish Syntax and Semantics

Issues in Relating Syntax Semantics

The design of a natural language understanding system is dependent on a rich and structured knowledge representation. Much recent work in computational and cognitive linguistics has focused on representations for syntactic and morphological knowledge. Similarly, the knowledge representation paradigm has proposed many conceptual tools for the representation of semantic knowledge. Combining the t...

Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics

This paper presents an analysis of the copy construction that explains its similarity to extraction constructions while accounting for its incompatibility with wh+NP phrases. Essentially, wh-phrases without an NP complement can be copied because they’re non-quantificational (introducing only a free variable into the derivation). Whphraseswith anNP complement cannot be copied because thesewh-phr...

Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 8

One of the long-standing questions in the syntax and semantics of English is how the CONTROLLER in control constructions is determined, and why it is determined in that manner. In literature, there are generally two lines of approaches to this issue: a syntactic approach based onMinimalDistance Principle (MDP; Rosembaum1967), which states that the controller is the closest c-commanding NP with ...

The Syntax/Semantics Interface: Compositionality Issues

Integrating Syntax and Semantics

Well-known examples such as Bar-Hillel's (1960) "The box is in the pen" illustrate that extensive semantic analysis is necessary to resolve ambiguities that must be resolved in machine translation. If one accepts the premise that semantics should be added to the analysis techniques used in machine translation, what is the way in which it should be added? This paper will argue for an integrated ...