German is a language with a relatively free word order. During the last few years considerable efforts have been made in all syntactic frameworks to explain so-called scrambling phenomena. In the following paper, I deal with some tough cases of German word order which cannot be described by assuming flat sentence structures or word order domains. The phenomena discussed are PP complements of no...

It is well known that the adult’s vocal tract is not a uniform scaled up version of a child vocal tract. Considering these morphological differences, what are the articulatory strategies used by the speaker throughout growth to produce the same vowels? Our previous simulation study [1] predicts that a speaker with a newborn-like vocal tract would employ a fronting articulation compared to an ad...

This contribution examines discontinuities in DG. Discontinuities are addressed in terms of catenae and rising. The catena is defined as A WORD OR A COMBINATION OF WORDS THAT IS CONTINUOUS WITH RESPECT TO DOMINANCE. The definition identifies any tree or subtree of a tree as a catena. Rising occurs when a governor fails to dominate one (or more) of its governees. Two sorts of rising are distingu...

Parser evaluation traditionally relies on evaluation metrics which deliver a single aggregate score over all sentences in the parser output, such as PARSEVAL. However, for the evaluation of parser performance concerning a particular phenomenon, a test suite of sentences is needed in which this phenomenon has been identified. In recent years, the parsing of discontinuous structures has received ...

Natural Language Interfaces are increasingly relevant for information systems fronting rich structured data stores such as RDF and OWL repositories, mainly because of the conception of them being intuitive for human. In the previous work, we developed FREyA, an interactive Natural Language Interface for querying ontologies. It uses syntactic parsing in combination with the ontology-based lookup...

It is well-known that the English auxiliaries are sensitive to the so called NICE (Negation, Inversion, Contraction, and Ellipsis) phenomena. Based on these empirical properties of auxiliaries, this paper argues for the existence of the construction aux-headph(rase) whose subtypes include negation-ph, inversion-ph, ellipsis-ph, vp-filler-ph, and the like. Each of this subtype has its own constr...

We present a new approach to language learning which is based on the following idea: if a language learner does not know which phrase-structure trees should be assigned to initial sentences, s/he allows (implicitly) for all possible trees and lets linguistic experience decide which is the ‘best’ tree for each sentence. The best tree is obtained by maximizing ‘structural analogy’ between a sente...

This tutorial presents an introduction to the contemporary linguistic framework known as optimality theory (OT). The basic assumptions of this constraint-based theory as a general model of grammar are first outlined, with formal notation being defined and illustrated. Concepts unique to the theory, including "emergence of the unmarked," are also described. OT is then examined more specifically ...

Electropalatographic and acoustical data on vowel-to-vowel (V-to-V) coarticulatory effects were obtained for Catalan VCV sequences, with the consonants representing different degrees of tongue-dorsum contact (dorsopalatal approximant [j], alveolo-palatal nasal [eta], alveolo-palatal lateral [lambda], and alveolar nasal [n]). Results show that the degree of V-to-V coarticulation in linguopalatal...