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 2011.

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 (e.g. pernum, gendnum, etc.) and a series of other feature values. You can place these features either on syntactic HEAD or on semantic INDEX.

After defining the feature name for the root type, 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 separate [GENDER] and [NUMBER] features. For more information please refer to Section 5.4 in Poulson 2011.

  Additional syntactic/semantic features

  Another example of features that could be added on this page is syntactic/semantic features not been fully covered by the questionnaire. For example, if you have already defined syntactic features for Number in the Number section of the questionnaire, but your language also requires a semantic feature for Number (see Kathol's example for more information here), you can add this semantic feature on the Other Features page.

  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 2011.

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 (1) below two kinds of agreement are observed, as 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 formal second person pronoun "vous" refers to a single person (semantically), but takes a plural form (syntactically), there are 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 assigned to semantic INDEX, following Pollard and Sag (1994). However, the Other Features page allows the user to add Gender/Person/Number features under syntactic HEAD as well, covering the agreement in form between French pronoun vous and verb êtes in the example above. Agreement is modeled in Grammar Matrix with the help of constraints on the valence lists of verbs and determiners.

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

Overall, the main direction of the future work in the Other Features implementation in the Matrix Customization system is to broaden the overall coverage across languages, allowing a "broader range of feature paths, thereby allowing other types of features to be defined" (from Poulson 2011).

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, C., & Sag, I. A. (1994). Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Stanford: CSLI.

• bibtex:

  @book{Pollard and Sag:1994,
  author = {Pollard, C., & Sag, I.},
  year = {1994},
  title = {Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar},
  publisher = {Stanford: CSLI}
  }

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}
  }