Journal of Language Modelling

Tier-based strict locality and the typology of agreement

Kenneth Hanson — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0200

This paper presents a subregular analysis of syntactic agreement patterns modeled using command strings over Minimalist Grammar (MG) dependency trees (Graf and Shafiei 2019), incorporating a novel MG treatment of agreement. Phenomena of interest include relativized minimality and its exceptions, direction of feature transmission, and configurations involving chains of agreeing elements. Such patterns are shown to fall within the class of tier-based strictly 2-local (TSL-2) languages, which has previously been argued to subsume the majority of long-distance syntactic phenomena, as well as those in phonology and morphology (Graf 2022a). This characterization places a tight upper bound on the range of configurations that are predicted to occur while providing parameters for variation which closely match the observed typology.

Against successive cyclicity:

Yusuke Kubota, Robert Levine — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0200

This paper proposes a novel analysis of extraction pathway marking in Type-Logical Grammar, taking advantage of proof-theoretic properties of logical proofs whose empirical application has so far been underexplored. The key idea is to allow certain linguistic expressions to be sensitive to the intermediate status of a syntactic proof. The relevant conditions can be stated concisely as constraints at the level of the proof term language, formally a special type of λ-calculus. The proposed analysis does not have any direct analog to either of the two familiar techniques for analyzing extraction pathway marking, namely, successive cyclic movement in derivational syntax and the SLASH feature percolation in HPSG.

Moreover, the ‘meaning-centered’ perspective that naturally emerges from this new analysis is conceptually revealing: on this approach, extraction pathway marking essentially boils down to a strategy that certain languages employ to overtly flag the existence of a semantic variable inside a partially derived linguistic expression whose interpretation is dependent on a higher-order operator that is located in a larger structure.

From speech signal to syntactic structure: A computational implementation

Tina Bögel, Tianyi Zhao — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0100

This paper presents a new computational implementation bridging several modules of grammar from phonetics to phonology to syntax. The system takes as input a speech signal annotated with syllables, interprets the phonetic data in phonological/prosodic terms, matches the data against a lexicon and makes the results available to a linguistically deep computational grammar. The system is showcased by means of syntactically ambiguous structures in German which can be disambiguated based on prosodic constituency information. A system evaluation with the German data showed good results for this new combination of automatic speech signal analysis and computational grammars, which takes a significant step towards a linguistically fine-grained computational analysis and hence towards real automatic speech understanding.