Constructive Adpositional Grammars

This book presents a new paradigm of natural language grammar analysis, based on adposition as the key concept, considered a general connection between two morphemes – or group of morphemes. The adpositional paradigm considers the morpheme as the basic unit to represent morphosyntax, taken as a whole, in terms of constructions, while semantics and pragmatics are treated accordingly. All linguistic observations within the book can be described through the methods and tools of Constructive Mathematics, so that the modelling becomes formally feasible. A full description in category-theoretic terms of the formal model is provided in the Appendix. A lot of examples taken from natural languages belonging to different typological areas are offered throughout the volume, in order to explain and validate the modeling – with special attention given to ergativity. Finally, a first real-world application of the paradigm is given, i.e., conversational analysis of the transcript of therapeutic settings in terms of constructive speech acts. The main goal of this book is to broaden the scope of Linguistics by including Constructive Mathematics in order to deal with known topics such as grammaticalization, children’s speech, language comparison, dependency and valency from a different perspective. It primarily concerns advanced students and researchers in the field of Theoretical and Mathematical Linguistics but the audience can also include scholars interested in applications of Topos Theory in Linguistics.

Dependencies – directed labeled graph structures representing hierarchical relations between morphemes, words, and semantic units – are the standard representation in many fields of computational linguistics. The linguistic significance of these structures often remains vague, however, and those working in the field stress the need for the development of a common notational and formal basis. Although dependency analysis has become quasi-hegemonic in Natural Language Processing (NLP), the connection between computational linguistics and dependency linguists remains sporadic. But theoretical dependency linguists and computational linguists have much to share. This book presents papers from the International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling 2011) held in Barcelona, Spain, in September 2011. Beginning with what may be the first formal definition of dependency structure, the book continues with papers covering subjects such as: the interface of the syntactic structures with semantics; mapping semantic structures to text surface by means of statistical language generation; formalization of dependency; advances in dependency parsing; and the link between statistical and rule-based dependency parsing. This comprehensive collection gives a coherent overview of recent advances in the interplay of linguistics and natural language engineering around dependency grammars, ranging from definitional challenges of syntactic functions to formal grammars, tree bank development, and parsing issues

Adpositions are used, universally, to mark the roles of nominal participants in the verbal clause, most commonly indirect object roles. Practically all languages seem to have such markers, which begin their diachronic life as lexical words -- in this case either serial verbs or positional nouns. In many languages, however, adpositions also seem to have extended their diachronic life one step further, becoming verbal affixes. The main focus of this book is the tail-end of the diachronic life cycle of adpositions. That is, the process by which, having arisen first as nominal-attached prepositions or post-positions, they wind up attaching themselves to verbs. Our core puzzle is thus fairly transparent: How and why should morphemes that pertain functionally to nominals, and begin their diachronic life-cycle as nominal grammatical operators, wind up as verbal morphology? While the core five chapters of this book focus on the rise of verb-attached prepositions in Homeric Greek, its theoretical perspective is broader, perched at the intersection of three closely intertwined core components of the study of human language: (a) the communicative function of grammar; (b) the balance between universality and cross-language diversity of grammars; and (c) the diachrony of grammatical constructions, how they mutate over time. While paying well-deserved homage to the traditional Classical scholarship, this study is firmly wedded to the assumption, indeed presupposition, that Homeric Greek is just another natural language, spoken before written, designed as an instrument of communication, and subject to the same universal constraints as all human languages. And further, that those constraints--so-called language universals--express themselves most conspicuously in diachronic change. Lastly, in analyzing the synchronic variation and text distribution of prepositional constructions in Homeric Greek, this study relies primarily on the theory-laden method of Internal Reconstruction.

AI's impact on human societies is and will be drastic in so many ways. AI is being adopted and implemented around the world, and government and universities are investing in AI studies, research, and development. However, very little research exists about the impact of AI on our lives. This book will address this gap; it will gather reflections from around the world to assess the impact of AI on different aspects of society as well as propose ways in which we can address this impact and the research agendas needed.

This book is the first to provide an integrated view of preposition from morphology to reasoning, via syntax and semantics. It offers new insights in applied and formal linguistics, and cognitive science. It underlines the importance of prepositions in a number of computational linguistics applications, such as information retrieval and machine translation. The reader will benefit from a wide range of views and applications to various linguistic frameworks, among which, most notably, HPSG. The book is for researchers working in the fields of computational linguistics, linguistics, and artificial intelligence.

While much attention has been devoted to simple nominal relators, especially prepositions and case markers, complex nominal relators have not yet been the focus of a systematic and cross-linguistic study. The chapters of this volume provide not only a working definition of such constructions, but also a description of complex adpositions and other complex nominal relators in a variety of European languages, both Indo-European and non-Indo-European, including some languages for which this phenomenon had received little attention, such as Breton and Albanian. Building on synchronic and diachronic corpus-based investigations, the authors show commonalities and specificities of these linguistic items across languages, trying to explain why and how they emerged. The research presented in this volume confirms the wide-spread use of complex adpositions in Europe, and the data reviewed in the final discussion suggests it might be the same in other parts of the world, as well. This book thus offers not only detailed descriptions of complex nominal relators in fifteen languages, but also indications of what to look for in other languages, and how to distinguish between a syntactically free sequence and a genuine complex nominal relator.