Unofficial Links and Notes on LFG/OT
by Joan Bresnan
[June 18, 2004]
New things are in gold
Links
up to October 2003 are now on a separate page.
Links
up
to August 2002 are now on a separate page.
Links
up
to September 2001 are now on a separate page.
Links
up
to October 2000 are now on a separate page.
Links
up to August 1999 are on a separate page.
Links
up to August 1998 are on a separate page.
Yes, there are some official links, too: start with Essex LFG and Stanford LFG, to find
more internet-accessible information about current research,
publications, people, and events.
Paul Kroeger's new book Analyzing
Syntax. A Leixcal Functional
Approach has just been published by Cambridge University
Press. This book is a superb first introduction to doing
descriptive syntax. Including chapters on serial verbs and pragmatic
functions as well as core topics of syntactic theory, it offers
examples from a rich variety of languages not usually treated in
elementary syntax texts.
Another volume introducing morphosyntax is in the works, which I have
had the pleasure
of reading in draft form.
The
Nordic
Journal of
Linguistics volume
2, no. 1 (2004: 61-95) has a fascinating article by Helge
Lødrup
on complementation,
which can
also be found on-line at the publishers's website (Cambridge
University Press):
http://journals.cambridge.org/bin/bladerunner?REQUNIQ=1087597120&REQSESS=3166407&117000REQEVENT=&REQINT1=217774&REQAUTH=0
Clausal
complementation in Norwegian
Helge Lødrup
Published Online: 04 May 2004
In Natural Language
& Linguistic Theory, August 2004, Volume 22, Issue 3, we
find
Tense
Beyond the Verb: Encoding
Clausal Tense/Aspect/Mood on Nominal Dependents
Rachel Nordlinger , Louisa
Sadler
pp. 597-641
and
Coordination: Consequences of
a Lexical-Functional Account
Peter G. Peterson
pp. 643-679
Asymmetric coordination
has been an important topic in LFG since Anette
Frank's
ground-breaking paper in LFG02:
A discourse analysis of asymmetric coordination (mentioned
below). Louisa Sadler has a very
nice study of asymmetric coordination in Welsh and other
languages, which builds on Anette Frank's work:
2004
I've
just read Brady Clark's doctoral
dissertation A
Stochastic Optimality Theory Approach to Syntactic Change. Keep an eye on his website for
the final version, which is a brilliant synthesis of work on stochastic
theory of syntactic change.
I've also just read Jan
Strunk's Master's
thesis on Possessive
constructions in modern Low Saxon, a beautiful piece of work based on
formal analysis and a corpus study.
Don't miss Paul
Boersma's new paper
---
Paul
Boersma. 2004. A Stochastic OT account of paralinguistic tasks
such as grammaticality and prototypicality judgments.
You can find this paper on his
website and on ROA. It is a very nice theoretical exposition
about why grammaticality judgments diverge from usage data, with
very informative discussion of the relations between grammaticality and
frequency, including a convincing reply to Keller and
Asudeh's (2002) critique of stochastic OT. Among other
things, he shows that grammaticality must be assessed relative to
inputs and argues that this nevertheless does not prevent the relative
grammaticality of arbitrary pairs of examples from being calculated in
stochastic OT. His proposed method bears a certain resemblance to
recent work by Andries Coetzee.
On Steve Wechsler's homepage there
are two new downloadable papers in OT-LFG:
Stephen
Wechsler, to appear. Number as Person. Proceedings
of the Fifth Syntax And Semantics Conference In Paris. [1/16/04
draft]
Stephen Wechsler, to appear. Elsewhere in Gender Resolution. In
Kristin
Hanson and Sharon Inkelas (eds.) The Nature of the Word— Essays in
Honor
of Paul Kiparsky. MIT Press. [revised 4/26/02]
Jan
Strunk has a
new paper on the genitive linking construction in Lower Saxon, which
you can download from his website:
Jan Strunk.
2004. The missing link? An LFG analysis of the prenominal possessive
construction in Low Saxon.
The paper
gives a very elegant LFG analysis and has usage data which he collected
with a tool he created to collect data from languages with
non-standardized orthographies.
I've just read a very
informative paper that can be downloaded from Kersti
Börjars's website as
well as the ROA:
Bermudez-Otero, Ricardo & Kersti
Börjars To appear. Markedness in phonology and syntax: the problem
of grounding. Lingua Special
issue on Linguistic knowledge:
perspectives from phonology and from syntax.
This paper discusses the relations between OT syntax and OT phonology
in an illuminating way, covering recent controversies over grounded
constraints, functionalism and formalism.
For those of you who
missed the Lfg'02 conference in Athens as I did, you won't want to
miss reading Anette Frank's paper "A
(Discourse) Functional Analysis of Asymmetric Coordination" in the proceedings.
It provides a new solution to the notorious problems posed by the
German
construction --
In
den Wald ging der Jaeger and fing einen Hasen.
(Into the forest went the hunter and caught a rabbit.)
--which has
been a challenge to all syntactic theories. Anette's solution
builds on the inherent distributivity of coordination, modelled as sets
of f-structures, together with a natural hypothesis of the
heightened prominence of the subject of the initial conjunct in
f-structure. Her simple and elegant solution illuminates the
underlying generalizations without requiring ad hoc
formal extensions. I just happened upon this paper recently and
have really enjoyed it.
I am currently reading
Wouter Kusters'
Linguistic Complexity: The
Influence of Social Change on Verbal Inflection., which has been
published int he
LOT
Dissertation Serires. He looks at Arabic,
Scandanavian, Quechua, and Swahili, and studies varieties that show
more and less morphological levelling in relation to the amount of
contact the speech communities have had with outsiders. He
provides an OT model of the chantges throughout. It's very
interesting and highly recommended!
I've just received a copy
of Ida
Toivonen's Non-Projecting
Words. A
Case Study of
Swedish Particles,
published by Kluwer in 2003. Don't miss
it!
You might enjoy reading
"On Stochastic Grammar" by Brady
Clark (2003).
This
is a very thoughtful ansewr to Fritz Newmeyer's LSA Presidential
Address "Grammar is Grammar and Usage is Usage".
Gerhard
Jäger has
several
very interesting and important new papers on his website:
Recursion by optimization: On the
complexity of bidirectional Optimality
Theory, in Natural
Language Engineering 9(1), 21-38
Evolutionary
Game Theory and Typology. A Case Study, manuscript, University of
Potsdam
Maximum
Entropy Models and Stochastic Optimality Theory, manuscript,
University of Potsdam
Simulating
language change with Functional OT, in Simon Kirby
(ed.), Language Evolution and Computation, Proceedings of the Workshop at
ESSLLI,Vienna 2003, pp 52-61
Learning
constraint sub-hierarchies. The Bidirectional Gradual Learning Algorithm,
to appear in R. Blutner & H. Zeevat (eds.), Pragmatics in OT,
Palgrave MacMillan
I have just read the evolutionary and the maximum-entropy papers (the
latter can also be found on the ROA), which are written with beautiful
clarity. Gerhard has an excellent discussion of the recent work
by Sharon Goldwater and Mark Johnson:
Gerhard will be visiting Stanford on his Heisenberg Fellowship starting
in January, and we will be co-teaching a course on optimization issues
in the spring.
Currently at Stanford, Guido Seiler is a postdoctoral
visitor, and you can see the proof of his presence in the Bay Area on
his website. Guido has just returned from NWAV32
in Philadelphia, where he gave a talk "What
can we learn from syntax geography? Evidence from the
Syntactic Atlas of Swiss German Dialects."
Helen de Hoop in Nijmegen
is hosting:
The program is quite
fascinating, and includes some of the new
stochastic work in OT. A joint paper by
Gerhard
Jäger & Anette Rosenbach " Cumulativity
in Variation: testing different versions of Stochastic OT empirically"
is most relevant to the issue of which optimization function(s) to
adopt, mentioned above.
In July of 2003 I attended
the LFG03
conference in Saratoga
Springs, New York. I was asked
to give a retrospective talk in commemoration of the 25th anniversary
of the first course on LFG, and I obliged by presenting "Lexical
Syntax 25 Years Later: A Retrospective and Prospective Look at the
Dative Alternation", which
is based on joint work with Tanya
Nikitina. The conference was beautifully organized by
Aaron
Broadwell, who
also
planned the excellent workshop on the syntax of native American
languages. Of the many stimulating talks, I particularly enjoyed Leonoor
van der Beek's talk on the
Dutch cleft construction and Jonas
Kuhn's paper on
"Generalized Tree Descriptions in LFG" and the
joint paper by Louisa
Sadler and Rachel
Nordlinger on "The
Syntax
and Semantics of Tensed Nominals". (Rachel is now a Lecturer at
the University of Melbourne.) A number of other distinguished
linguists were present, including ( but not limited to!) Andrew
Spencer, whose
paper on
case had the audience hopping to have their questions answered, Joan
Maling (attending rather
than
presenting, and now Linguistics program director at the NSF), Peter
Sells (on his way
to the
HPSG conference), Cathy
O'Connor (Boston
rUniversity), Amy
Dahlstrom (university of
Chicago), Kersti Börjars (University
of
Manchester), as well as Tara
Mohanan, K.P.
Mohanan, who were
accompanied by their daughter Malavika about to graduate from
Stanford.
Several recent LFG-related
publications:
Go to Adams Bodomo's website
for information about a new collection of essays on Chinese:
Bodomo, A.
B. and K. K. Luke. (eds.)
2003. Lexical-Functional Grammar Analysis of Chinese. Journal of
Chinese Linguistics Monograph 19
CSLI Publications
has several new LFG-related works of interest:
Optimality-Theoretic
Syntax: A Declarative Approach Jonas Kuhn
Topics
in the Clausal Syntax of German Judith Berman
and Nominals Inside and Out,
edited by Miriam Butt and Tracy King. Unfortunately,
I couldn't find that last book on CSLI's website, which may not be
up-to-the-minute in this respect. But you can find the table of
contents on Miriam's Konstanz website.