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Institute: search.filters.UBSInstitut.Sonderforschungsbereich 732, Incremental specification in contextPublication Type: search.filters.UBSTyp.Arbeitspapier

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    SinSpeC 01
    (2008)
    Volume 1 of the Working Papers of the SFB732 "Incremental Specification in Context" (SinSpeC)
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    Sub-lexical investigations: German particles, prefixes and prepositions
    (2013) Roßdeutscher, Antje
    The papers investigate constructions with P(repositional) elements in German. It aims at a comprehensive theory of the syntax-semantics interface for the different verbal constructions in German, including verb plus prepostional phrase, (separable) particle verbs, and (inseparable) prefix verbs. The constructions are given syntactic representations following minimalist principles as known from \textit{Distributive Morphology} (DM) according to which a single syntactic engine drives formation of both words and phrases. Among the syntactic principles the Split-P hypothesis plays a central role. A crucial feature of the approach is that the syntactic structures are used as input to the computation of semantic representations according to principles of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). Several challenges that present themselves for a compositional theory of word- and phrase- formation with P-elements in German are accounted for in the paper: syntactic separability of verb-particle constructions vs non-separability of prefix-verbs; semantic restrictions in the P-elements to build constructions of the former and the latter type; syntactic alternations w.r.t. the realisation of figure and ground arguments and the semantic basis of these alternations. A particular challenge are the differences in the conceptual and aspectual contribution of the same prepositional root in different syntactic contexts.
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    Disambiguation and reambiguation
    (2009) Hamm, Fritz; Kamp, Hans; Solstad, Torgrim; Roßdeutscher, Antje (ed.)
    The papers in this volume developed as part of the two projects "The Role of Lexical Information in the Context of Word-formation, Sentence and Discourse" and the project "Representation of Ambiguities and their Resolution in Context". In the former, a theory of "-ung"-nominalisation in German has been developed. The two papers presented in this volume focus on the second part of the joint enterprise of the two projects, namely on disambiguation of "-ung"-nouns in context. Hamm and Kamp study a proto-typical example, "die Absperrung der Botschaft" "the cordoning-off of the embassy", which is three-way ambiguous. This DP can denote a material object (the fence used for cordoning-off), an event (the process of cordoning-off) or a result state (the embassy being cordoned off). Formally, this three-way ambiguity is represented by an underspecified DRS. The paper contributes a partial answer to the general question which contextual factors are responsible for the (partial) disambiguation of this DP in discourse. The disambiguation process is described on the level of DRT. Building on the results in the first paper, the second paper by Hamm and Solstad focuses on problems that arise in anaphora resolution of pronouns with ambiguous nouns like "die Absperrung der Botschaft" as antecedent. What happens if the selection restriction of the verb in the antecedent sentence and that of the consequent sentence are incompatible? This situation is exemplified in (1): (1) Die Absperrung der Botschaft wurde vorgestern von Demonstranten behindert. Wegen anhaltender Unruhen wird SIE auch heute aufrecht erhalten. "The cordoning-off of the embassy was hampered by protesters the day before yesterday. Due to continuing unrest, it [the state of being cordoned off] is sustained today as well." "Behindern" "to hamper" filters out both the entity-reading and the result state reading of "Absperrung", but the verb "aufrecht erhalten" "to sustain" requires the result state as its argument. Thus, in order for the anaphoric pronoun 'sie' to be resolved successfully, the first sentence should provide a result state which, however, is not available, if the result state reading has been erased. Hamm and Solstad show that the required result state can be reconstructed - even under the assumption that "behindern" erases the result state reading of the first sentence in (1). This is achieved in a process of "reambiguation". Reambiguation involves a non-monotonic inference process. The question arise what triggers this process and what its restrictions are. Hamm and Solstad provide formally precise answers to these questions. Again a combination of UDRT and the event calculus provide the framework where these puzzles can be solved.
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    Focus at the syntax-semantics interface
    (2009) Riester, Arndt; Onea, Edgar (eds.)
    This volume contains a significant part of the talks presented at the Workshop on "Focus at the Syntax-Semantics Interface", which took place on April 6th-7th, 2008 at the University of Stuttgart. The aim of the workshop was to address some major semantic and syntactic issues of focus theory: focus representation, compositionality, focus interpretation, syntactic marking, presuppositions, focus sensitivity as well as focus movement. In addition, related phenomena such as the semantics of discourse particles and the relation between discourse prominence and case marking were raised.
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    Analysing German verb-particle constructions with 'auf' within a DRT based framework
    (2009) Lechler, Andrea; Roßdeutscher, Antje
    The paper presents the results of a comprehensive case study which examined to what extent the semantics of particle verbs with auf can be understood as composed from the semantics of their parts. We give substance to our leading hypothesis that the semantics of particle constructions can be reconstructed as rule-based by means of semantics construction algorithms in a DRT-based framework. The compositional process is displayed through merging the semantic representations of the verbal root and the particle. Composition, as it is made operative in the DRT-framework, is akin to processes of presupposition justification as familiar from Dynamic Semantics. This method is shown appropriate for modelling the wide spectrum of compositional mechanisms which have to be taken into account in the formal semantics of particle verbs. The ambiguity of the particle auf can be reconstructed as restricted to only a few core meanings, some of which are familiar from the literature. We present lexical entries for the core meanings, apply them in the semantics construction and discuss sub-cases as well as metaphorical extensions.
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    Ontology and argument structure in nominalizations
    (2013) Pross, Tillmann; Roßdeutscher, Antje (Hrsg.)
    Based on data from German -ung nominalizations, I argue that selection restriction tests are not suitable as linguistic tools for ontological disambiguation. Consequently, I question the significance of ontology as a starting point for linguistic theorizing. Instead, I argue for an underspecified account of the ontology of nominalizations, in which disambiguation looses its central role in the commerce with ambiguity.
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    A clustering approach to automatic verb classification incorporating selectional preferences: model, implementation, and user manual
    (2010) Schulte im Walde, Sabine; Schmid, Helmut; Wagner, Wiebke; Hying, Christian; Scheible, Christian
    This report presents two variations of an innovative, complex approach to semantic verb classes that relies on selectional preferences as verb properties. The underlying linguistic assumption for this verb class model is that verbs which agree on their selectional preferences belong to a common semantic class. The model is implemented as a soft-clustering approach, in order to capture the polysemy of the verbs. The training procedure uses the Expectation-Maximisation (EM) algorithm (Baum, 1972) to iteratively improve the probabilistic parameters of the model, and applies the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle (Rissanen, 1978) to induce WordNet-based selectional preferences for arguments within subcategorisation frames. One variation of the MDL principle replicates a standard MDL approach by Li and Abe (1998), the other variation presents an improved pruning strategy that outperforms the standard implementation considerably. Our model is potentially useful for lexical induction (e.g., verb senses, subcategorisation and selectional preferences, collocations, and verb alternations), and for NLP applications in sparse data situations. We demonstrate the usefulness of the model by a standard evaluation (pseudo-word disambiguation), and three applications (selectional preference induction, verb sense disambiguation, and semi-supervised sense labelling).