The Syntax and Semantics of Punctuation and Its Use in Interpretation

In this paper, I argue for a declarative description of the syntax and semantics of punctuation marks (in English) couched in a feature/uniication-based phrase structure formalism, describe how Nunberg's (1990) syntactic analysis of punctuation can be combined with Dale's (1991) suggested semantic analysis within this framework, and present experimental evidence that 1) the resulting text grammar should be interleaved with the lexical grammar to eeciently resolve ambiguity and 2) that the role of punctuation is not only to resolve syntactic and semantic ambiguity in the lexical grammar but also to encode and facilitate purely discourse relational links between text units in text sentences. 1 The Syntax of Punctuation Nunberg (1990) argues that the punctuation system is, rstly, systematic and linguistic, in the sense that it obeys principles and constraints of a type familiar from work on other linguistic subsystems such as phonology or syntax, and secondly, it is a separate linguistic subsystem not reducible to principles of (prosodic) phonology or syntax. Nunberg develops a partial grammar of English text sentences which incorporates many constraints that (ultimately) restrict the syntactic and semantic/pragmatic interpretation of the text. For example, one such constraint is that textual adjunct clauses introduced by colons scope over following punctuation, as (1a) illustrates; another is that textual adjuncts introduced by dashes cannot intervene between a bracketed adjunct and the textual unit to which it attaches, as in (1b). (1) a *He told them his reason: he would not renegotiate his contract, but he did not explain to the team owners. (vs. but would stay) b *She left { who could blame her { (during the chainsaw scene) and went home. Nunberg's analysis, therefore, incorporates constraints on grammatical sequences of punctuation marks and on the manner in which such punctuation serves to hierarchically structure text. Nunberg outlines a procedural, derivational account of`text grammar'. I have developed a succinct, declarative grammar in a feature/uniication-based phrase structure formalism (Briscoe, 1994). This grammar captures the bulk of the text-sentential constraints described by Nunberg with a grammar which compiles into 26 rules in a formalism which employs a syntactic variant of deenite clause grammar rules incorporating (iterative) Kleene operators (Briscoe et al. , 1987). 1 The grammar treats all words uniformly and groups them iteratively into at textual units according to surounding punctuation; for example, the text sentence in (2a) receives four analyses of which that in (2b) is correct. 2 1 I …