MatrixDoc_Person

Documentation for the Grammar Matrix Customization Person Library

Introduction

This document explains how to fill out the person page of the Grammar Matrix Customization questionnaire and presents background information on the person library of the Grammar Matrix Customization System (Bender et al., 2002; Bender and Flickinger, 2005; Bender et al., 2010). General instructions on using the questionnaire can be found here.

Citing the Person Library

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

Options

The person page in Matrix Customization questionnaire is divided into two sections, with person values in the first section and the interaction of person with number in the second section.

In the first section you are asked to define person values existing in your language. The possible person values are: first (referring to the speaker), second (the person spoken to), third (everybody else), and fourth person (its definition varies from language to language). Grammar Matrix Customization system requires you to choose from the following options:

• None
• First, second, and third
• First, second, third, and fourth
• First and non-first
• Second and non-second
• Third and non-third

Please choose the option that best describes the person system in your language. The person library allows you to specify the range of values for the feature PERSON (or PERNUM) that will be available elsewhere in the customization system and in the resulting grammar (see more on that in the Analyses section below).

Please note that like gender, in terms of filling out the Grammar Matrix questionnaire, we are dealing with person only insofar as it is expressed grammatically, i.e. through some form of agreement. If your language does not express person through agreement, please choose the option "None".

Next section of the Matrix Customization questionnaire deals with the absence/presence of the subtypes of the first person in your language. Depending on your answers in this section, your grammar will use either the feature PERSON or PERNUM (more details in section Analyses below). You are provided with the following options in this section:

• none
• inclusive and exclusive in the
• other:

If your language does not distinguish subtypes for the first person, please select "none" in this section and move to the next page of the questionnaire. If your language has different forms for the first person, please select options "inclusive and exclusive" or "other." If you choose one of these options, you will also need to enter the subtypes of the first person on the bottom of the page. If you choose "inclusive and exclusive" option, a dropdown menu will appear to the right of this option with the number values you have defined on the number page of the questionnaire.

English is an example of a language with two distinct forms for the first person of the verb to be, i.e. 1sg am and 1pl are and therefore requires creation of subtypes for first person.

For more information on how to use the questionnaire to define values for PERSON in your language, please refer to the person page in Matrix Customization.

For more analysis and implementation of the person hierarchy in your language please refer to the Analyses section below.

Motivation

Grammar Matrix uses a single [PERNUM] feature or two separate features [PERSON] and [NUMBER], depending on the presence/absence of the subtypes in the first person in a given language. This approach allows Grammar Matrix customization system to account both for the languages that have a distinct form for each combination of person and number (using separate [PERSON] and [NUMBER] features) and for the languages that do not have a distinct form for person/number combinations.

For example, English grammar requires the feature PERNUM (with values 1sg, 3sg, and non1sg), in order to avoid double parses for a sentence "You walk the dog." If separate PERSON and NUMBER features were to be used, this sentence would have been parsed as "You.SG walk the dog" and "You.PL walk the dog." If a merged feature PERNUM is applied instead, this sentence is correctly analyzed as "You.Non1Sg walk the dog," thus eliminating spurious ambiguity.

For more information on using customized number hierarchy for your target language, please refer to Drellishak 2009, Section 5.3.4.

Analyses

Depending on the choices you make on the person page in Matrix Customization, your starter grammar will either include the feature [PERSON person] or [PERNUM pernum]. If your language has a distinct form for each person and number combination and does not have subtypes for first person (i.e. if you chose option "none" in the second section of the questionnaire page), then your grammar will use a separate feature PERSON. If your language is inclusive/exclusive or minimal/augmented and has subtypes for first person (for some values of the NUMBER feature), then your grammar will use the feature PERNUM instead, in order to account for the merged person and number hierarchy.

Note that like GENDER and NUMBER, PERSON is a feature of the nominal INDEX. Making PERSON a feature of semantic INDEX instead of syntactic HEAD allows for correct semantic representation of person in your grammar and avoiding spurious ambiguity during generation.

If your grammar uses feature PERNUM, you will be able to define its values later in the questionnaire on the Other Features page.

The values you assign to PERSON feature will be available to use later in the customization system, especially the Morphology and Lexicon pages. The answers you provide on this page will determine the values available on the Lexicon page for the PERSON feature. PERSON will also appear as one of the features of the lexical rule types on Morphology page.

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

The analyses implemented in the person library are described in Drellishak 2009, Section 5.3.

PERSON is a feature often involved in agreement phenomena. These are handled through the lexicon and morphology libraries. The analyses of agreement implemented in the Grammar Matrix are described in Drellishak 2009, Section 5.2.

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}
}