MatrixDoc_OtherFeatures

Documentation for the Grammar Matrix Customization Other Features Library

• [ This documentation is under construction. ]

Introduction

This document explains how to fill out the Other Features page and presents background information on the Other Features library of the Grammar Matrix Customization System (Bender et al., 2002; Bender and Flickinger, 2005; Bender et al., 2010). For more information about Other Features page please refer to Section 5.4.2 in Drellishak 2009 and Section 5.4 in Poulson 2012.

General instructions on using the questionnaire can be found here.

Citing the Other Features Library

The standard reference for the Other Features Library and its implementations is Drellishak 2009. The full reference and .bib entry can be found here.

Options

The Other Features page of the Grammar Matrix Customization questionnaire allows you to add the features beyond the ones that you have already defined in the rest of the questionnaire. For every feature you add, you will define a type hierarchy, which consists of a root type you will name (e.g. pernum, gendnum, etc.), and then a series of other values of the feature, each of which is the subtype of at least one of the other values, possibly the root. You can define features and the values associated with them, placing them either on syntactic HEAD or on semantic INDEX.

For any feature you wish to add to your grammar on Other Features page, after you define the Feature name for this root type (e.g. PERNUM, GENDNUM, etc.), you will be asked to describe this feature in more detail based on the following questions:

• Is this feature:

  • a syntactic feature (which will go under head)?
  • a semantic feature (which will go under index)?

  Is this feature for:

  • nominal categories?
  • verbal categories?
  • both categories?

  Values in the feature hierarchy:

  • use an existing value type
  • define a new value type

After defining whether this feature is syntactic or semantic, as well as whether it applies to nominals, verbs, or both categories, you will be asked to define the values in the feature hierarchy. You can either use an existing type and/or define a new value type. If you use an existing value type, you will need to choose from the value types that you have previously defined in the questionnaire, such as tense, person, etc. that will be available in the drop-down menu. If you need to add a new value type that was not previously defined in the questionnaire, you will need to add the name of the value and its supertype. Its supertype can be the root type that you defined above or any other type that you decide to add.

Below are just a few examples of the additional features that can be defined on Other Features page:

• Merged features

  The Other Features page is a good place to add merged features if such exist in your grammar. For example, a [PERNUM] or a [GENDNUM] feature could be added here, if your grammar uses the [PERNUM] feature instead of separate [PERSON] and [NUMBER] features, or if your grammar uses a [GENDNUM] feature instead of [GENDER] and [NUMBER] features. For more information please refer to Section 5.4 in Poulson 2012.

-

• Additional Tense and Aspect features

  Another example of features that can be added to your grammar on the Other Features page are Tense and Aspect features that were not definable on the Tense, Aspect, and Mood page. Here you can define these features on syntactic HEAD (or semantic INDEX), with a corresponding hierarchy of values (types). For more information please refer to Section 5.4 in Poulson 2012.

-

• Additional syntactic or semantic verb features

  Another example is adding syntactic/semantic features for pronouns... (Kathol's example, see here for more information)

These were just a few examples of the additional features that can be added on the Other Features page. The number of the features and their values that you can add to your grammar on this page is unlimited.

Motivation

The Other Features page allows user enough flexibility to cover the additional grammar phenomena, otherwise not covered in the questionnaire. The examples covered in the above section, i.e. the need for the merged features, additional tense and aspect features, as well as the syntactic/semantic features are a few examples of why this section can be very useful to a linguist user.

In Kathol's example below two kinds of agreement are observed described in detail in Section 5.2 in Drellishak 2009.

• Vous êtes belle you are.pl beautiful.sg.fem ‘You are beautiful.’ |fra| (Kathol 1999:239)

• Because in this example a personal pronoun "vous" refers to a single person (semantically), but takes a plural form (syntactically), we have two kinds of agreement in this sentence:
  • (1). "Syntactic" agreement (agreement in form) between vous.Plural and êtes.PLURAL (2). "Semantic" agreement (agreement in meaning) between vous.SINGULAR and belle.SINGULAR

If, for example, the user defines the Gender/Person/Number features only on their corresponding questionnaire pages, these features by default will be placed on semantic INDEX only, following Pollard and Sag (1994). However, the Other Features page allows the user to add Gender/Person/Number feature under syntactic HEAD as well, covering the (syntactic) agreement in form between French pronoun vous and verb êtes in the example above.

• "There are two kinds of agreement here. The polite second person pronoun "vous" is plural in form, but here refers to a single person. The verb "êtes" agrees with the pronoun in number and is marked plural, but the predicate adjective belle also agrees with the pronoun in number and is marked singular. Kathol analyzes this as two different kinds of agreement, modeled using two different number features on the pronoun. The first number feature appears under agr inside head and is identified with a similar agr feature on the verb. Kathol refers to this as morpho-syntactic agreement. The second number feature appears on the index, as in Pollard and Sag (1994). Kathol refers to this as index agreement. My analysis of agreement is a hybrid of these analyses. By default, grammars produced by filling out the questionnaire model gender, person, and number using gender, number, and person features on index, as in Pollard and Sag (1994). However, the questionnaire also allows the user-linguist to define other features and their associated values, and allows these additional features to be placed on either the syntactic head or the semantic index (see §5.4.2 for details of this “other features” mechanism). Unlike in Kathol’s analysis, all agreement is modeled using constraints on the valence lists of targets (verbs and determiners), rather than having an agr feature that appears on both controllers and targets. The ability to define both syntactic and semantic features provides enough flexibility to describe grammars with the sort of agreement pattern seen in (82) above."

Analyses

Based on the answers you provide on Other Features customization page page, your starter grammar will either place your new feature(s) under syntactic HEAD or semantic INDEX.

If/after you define the additional features on this page, these features and their values will now be available for use on Morphology and Lexicon pages.

The choices you make on the Other Features customization page, will also affect the lexical types (your_language_name.tdl file), lexical rules (lrules.tdl file), and inflectional rules (irules.tdl file).

Upcoming Work

• [ This documentation is under construction. When it is more complete, this section should describe any modifications to or enhancements of this library that are either in progress or planned. ]

References

Drellishak, Scott. 2009. Widespread but Not Universal: Improving the Typological Coverage of the Grammar Matrix. PhD thesis, University of Washington.

• bibtex:

  @phdthesis{Drellishak:09,
  author = {Scott Drellishak},
  year = {2009},
  title = {Widespread but Not Universal: Improving the Typological Coverage of the {G}rammar {M}atrix},
  school = {University of Washington}
  }

Kathol, A. (1999). Agreement and the Syntax-morphology Interface in HPSG. In R. Levine and G. Green (Eds.), Readings in HPSG, pages 223–274, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• bibtex:

  @incollection{Kathol:1999,
  author = {Andreas Kathol},
  year = {1999},
  title = {Agreement and the Syntax-morphology Interface in HPSG},
  editor = {R. Levine and G. Green}
  booktitle = {Readings in HPSG}
  pages = {223-274}
  publisher = {Cambridge: Cambridge University Press}
  }

Pollard and Sag (1994).

Poulson, L. (2011). Meta-modeling of Tense and Aspect in a Cross-linguistic Grammar Engineering Platform. UW Working Papers in Linguistics, 28.

• bibtex:

  @article{Poulson:11,
  author = {Laurie Poulson},
  year = {2011},
  title = {Meta-modeling of Tense and Aspect in a Cross-linguistic Grammar Engineering Platform},
  volume = {28}
  }