Multilingual Processing of Auxiliaries within LFG (original) (raw)

12. Multilingual Processing of Auxiliaries within LFG

Natural Language Processing and Speech Technology, 1996

This paper proposes an analysis of English, French, and German auxiliaries in the context of parallel grammar development. We present an LFG implementation of the analysis which factors out language particular morphological wellformedness conditions from linguistically generalizable contributions of auxiliaries. Auxiliaries are treated as feature carrying elements, rather than as raising verbs. This avoids unnessary structural complexity and provides a uniform crosslinguistic analysis which eases the burden for machine translation. Im Kontext der parallelen Grammatikentwicklung wird eine Behandlung von Auxiliaren im Englischen, Französischen und Deutschen vorgeschlagen. Die LFG Implementierung trennt sprachspezifische morphologische Wohlgeformtheitsbedingungen klar von linguistisch generalisierbaren Beiträgen der Auxiliare, indem Auxiliare nicht als raising Verben, sondern als funktionale Elemente behandelt werden. Somit wird unnötige strukturelle Komplexität vermieden, und eine einheitliche sprachübergreifende Analyse bereitgestellt, die auch maschinelleÜbersetzung erleichtern kann. 1 Newer work in HPSG on French (e.g., Abeillé and Godard (1994)) and Italian (Monachesi (1995)) has moved away from this particular implementation, instead relying on the mechansism of argument composition first introduced by Hinrichs and Nakazawa (1990) for German. While these approaches advocate a "flat" representation of auxiliaries, they do so at the level of phrase structure. A hierarchical relationship between auxilaries and main verbs (com

On Auxiliary Chains: Lexical and Functional Auxiliaries at the syntax-semantics interface

Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics, 2015

The present paper is focused on the study of those relations that auxiliary verbs can establish among themselves when chained in a sequence. Regarding those sequences, which in Spanish can be considerably long, the literature has displayed primarily interest in formulating a set of principles that can predict possible relative orderings among auxiliaries. On the contrary, our paper delves into a less walked path: the description of relations established within an auxiliary chain. We will start from the traditional definition of auxiliary verb as a unit that modifies the ‘main’ or ‘lexical’ verb, and proceed to show that such a conception makes the wrong predictions when it comes to explain those internal relations, for it only accounts for a subset of the cases. This explanatory problem is common to both traditional and more formal models. In our opinion, the distinction between between <em>lexical </em>and <em>functional</em> auxiliaries that we propose in t...

Grammaticalization of auxiliaries and parametric changes

The Linguistic Review, 2017

This paper looks at constructions with non-clitic auxiliaries in Old Romanian, which precede the generalized option for clitic auxiliaries in the same language. We argue that non-clitic auxiliaries belong to a grammar with genuine SVO, scrambling to Spec, AspP, and subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI as AUX-to Fin). The generalization of the clitic auxiliary entails the loss of these properties, while triggering a parametric shift in word order to VSO, discourse oriented fronting of constituents (to CP only instead of Spec, AspP), and Long Head Movement (LHM through V-to-Focus) instead of SAI. Implicitly, this analysis supports the distinction between A (AUX-to-Fin) and A-bar (V-to-Focus) head movement of verbal elements, and further refines it by showing that these two types of movement do not concern two specific types of heads (i.e., operator for the C domain versus non-operator for the T domain; Roberts 2001, Head movement. In Mark Baltin & Chris Collins (eds.),

Lessons from the English auxiliary system

Journal of Linguistics, 2019

The English auxiliary system exhibits many lexical exceptions and subregularities, and considerable dialectal variation, all of which are frequently omitted from generative analyses and discussions. This paper presents a detailed, movement-free account of the English Auxiliary System within Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2010, Michaelis 2011, Boas & Sag 2012) that utilizes techniques of lexicalist and construction-based analysis. The resulting conception of linguistic knowledge involves constraints that license hierarchical structures directly (as in context-free grammar), rather than by appeal to mappings over such structures. This allows English auxiliaries to be modeled as a class of verbs whose behavior is governed by general and class-specific constraints. Central to this account is a novel use of the feature aux, which is set both constructionally and lexically, allowing for a complex interplay between various grammatical constraints that captures a wide range of excepti...

ON AUXILIARY CHAINS: AUXILIARIES AT THE SYNTAX-SEMANTICS INTERFACE

The present paper is focused on the study of those relations that auxiliary verbs can establish among themselves when chained in a sequence. Regarding those sequences, which in Spanish can be considerably long, the literature has displayed primarily interest in formulating a set of principles that can predict possible relative orderings among auxiliaries. On the contrary, our paper delves into a less walked path: the description of relations established within an auxiliary chain. We will start from the traditional definition of auxiliary verb as a unit that modifies the ‘main’ or ‘lexical’ verb, and proceed to show that such a conception makes the wrong predictions when it comes to explain those internal relations, for it only accounts for a subset of the cases. This explanatory problem is common to both traditional and more formal models. In our opinion, the distinction between lexical and functional auxiliaries that we propose in this work, in the context of a dynamic computational model that includes and derives this distinction, allows us to overcome these shortcomings of traditional analyses. Keywords. Auxiliary verbs; auxiliary chains; modal deontic verbs; mixed phrase structure