Working Papers in Linguistics: Volume 58 (Autumn 2008)

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https://kb.osu.edu/handle/1811/80860

Edited by Brian D. Joseph and Julia Porter Papke


Front Matter
pp. i-v
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Adventures With CAMiLLe: Investigating the Architecture of the Language Faculty Through Computational Simulation
Culicover, Peter W.; Nowak, Andrzej; Borkowski, Wojciech; Woznicki, Katherine pp. 1-29
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The Vocalization of /L/ in Urban Blue Collar Columbus, OH African American Vernacular English: A Quantitative Sociophonetic Analysis
Durian, David pp. 30-51
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Knowledge- and Labor-Light Morphological Analysis
Hana, Jirka pp. 52-84
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Morphological Complexity Outside of Universal Grammar
Hana, Jirka; Culicover, Peter W. pp. 85-109
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Discourse Constraints on Extraposition from Definite NP Subjects in English
Maynell, Laurie A. pp. 110-137
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A Consumer's Guide to Contemporary Morphological Theories
Stewart, Tom pp. 138-230
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    Front Matter (Number 58, Autumn 2008)
    (Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 2008)
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    Adventures With CAMiLLe: Investigating the Architecture of the Language Faculty Through Computational Simulation
    (Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 2008) Culicover, Peter W.; Nowak, Andrzej; Borkowski, Wojciech; Woznicki, Katherine
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    Knowledge- and Labor-Light Morphological Analysis
    (Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 2008) Hana, Jirka
    We describe a knowledge and labor-light system for morphological analysis of fusional languages, exemplified by analysis of Czech. Our approach takes the middle road between completely unsupervised systems on the one hand and systems with extensive manually-created resources on the other. For the majority of languages and applications neither of these extreme approaches seems warranted. The knowledge-free approach lacks precision and the knowledge- intensive approach is usually too costly. We show that a system using a little knowledge can be effective. This is done by creating an open, flexible, fast, portable system for morphological analysis. Time needed for adjusting the system to a new language constitutes a fraction of the time needed for systems with extensive manually created resources: days instead of years. We tested this for Russian, Portuguese and Catalan.
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    Morphological Complexity Outside of Universal Grammar
    (Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 2008) Hana, Jirka; Culicover, Peter W.
    There are many logical possibilities for marking morphological features. However only some of them are attested in languages of the world, and out of them some are more frequent than others. For example, it has been observed (Sapir 1921; Greenberg 1957; Hawkins & Gilligan 1988) that inflectional morphology tends to overwhelmingly involve suffixation rather than prefixation. This paper proposes an explanation for this asymmetry in terms of acquisition complexity. The complexity measure is based on the Levenshtein edit distance, modified to reflect human memory limitations and the fact that language occurs in time. This measure produces some interesting predictions: for example, it predicts correctly the prefix-suffix asymmetry and shows mirror image morphology to be virtually impossible.
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    Discourse Constraints on Extraposition from Definite NP Subjects in English
    (Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 2008) Maynell, Laurie A.
    This paper examines English restrictive relative clauses that are extraposed from definite NP subjects, and their relationship to the discourse context in which they may be uttered. In contrast to previous work on this topic (Huck & Na, 1990, 1992), I demonstrate that extraposed relative clauses need not contain information that is given with respect to discourse context. Rather, extraposed clauses may contain either discourse-given information or discourse-new information. What is critical for extraposition of relative clauses from definite NP subjects is how informative the relative clauses are with respect to the Question Under Discussion as defined by Roberts (1996). In that sense, these extraposed relatives must provide new information with respect to a localized portion of the discourse content, and not with respect to the discourse as a whole. Thus, the acceptability of this particular structure depends not on a syntactic configuration but on local information structure in a discourse.
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    A Consumer's Guide to Contemporary Morphological Theories
    (Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 2008) Stewart, Tom