Monday, October 06, 2008
11:00 AM
CSB 703
Aravind Joshi
University of Pennsylvania
Flexible Composition, Multiple Adjoning and Word Order Variation
Tree-Local Multi-Component TAGs (called hereafter just MC-TAG for
short) are known to be weakly equivalent to standard TAGs,
however, they can describe structures not derivable in the
standard TAG. There are other variants of MC-TAG, such as MC-TAG
with (a) flexible composition and (b) multiple adjoining of
modifier (non-predicative) auxiliary trees that are also weakly
equivalent to TAGs, but can describe structures not derivable
with MC-TAG. Our main goal in this paper is to determine the
word order patterns that can be generated in these MC-TAG
variants while respecting semantic dependencies in the grammar
and derivation. We use some word order phenomena such as
scrambling and clitic climbing to illustrate our approach. This
is not a study of scrambling or clitic climbing per se. We do not
claim that the patterns of dependencies that are derivable are
all equally acceptable. Other considerations such as processing
will also come into play. However, patterns that are not
derivable are predicted to be clearly unacceptable.