Compositionality and Syntactic Generalizations

Abstract

The central problem of this dissertation is the question how syntactic generalizations can be adequately captured in a compositional framework. This problem will be investigated within the controlled M-Grammar formalism. I will describe how a number of complex syntactic constructions have been dealt with in this formalism, which has been used in developing the Rosetta machine translation system. In particular, I will show that these syntactic constructions have been dealt with in a syntactically adequate manner in a framework which is compositional in nature, and where consequently the grammar has a strong semantic bias. The syntactic generalizations that I am mainly interested in here relate to the fact that many constructions can be described most adequately by a conglomerate of construction-independent rules. This construction-independence of syntactic rules, and the relation between syntax and semantics will be discussed in detail. In addition, the research has been carried out in the context of research into machine translation, i.e. application-oriented research. Application-oriented research differs from purely theoretical research in a number of respects, some of which will be discussed in the thesis. The general conclusions of this study are (1) that the grammatical formalism used, controlled M-grammar, supplies, due to its compositional nature, a firm framework to deal with certain phenomena, especially when they relate fairly directly to semantics (e.g. predicate-argument relations);(2) that the framework makes it possible to incorporate analyses in which constructions are created by a conglomerate of construction-independent rules; (3) that it is possible to incorporate and extend syntactically adequate descriptions based on insights from theoretical linguistics into this compositional framework in a fairly direct manner. It will, however, also become clear that many improvements of the framework, or of specific linguistic analyses within it, are still possible.