tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Right Attachment and Yorick Preference Wilks Semantics"

The paper claims that the right attachment rules for phrases originally suggested by Frazier and Fodor are wrong, and that none of the subsequent patchings of the rules by syntactic methods have improved the situation. For each rule there are perfectly straightforward and indefinitely large classes of simple counter-examples. W e then examine suggestions by Ford et M., Schubert and Hirst which are quasi-semantic in nature and which we consider ingenious but unsatisfactory. | Right Attachment and Preference Semantics. Yorick Wilks Computing Research Laboratory New Mexico state University Las Cruces NM 88003 USA. ABSTRACT The paper claims that the right attachment rules for phrases originally suggested by Frazier and Fodor are wrong and that none of the subsequent patchings of the rules by syntactic methods have improved the situation. For each rule there are perfectly straightforward and indefinitely large classes of simple counter-examples. We then examine suggestions by Ford et al. Schubert and Hirst which are quasi-semantic in nature and which we consider ingenious but unsatisfactory. We point towards a straightforward solution within the framework of preference semantics set out in detail elsewhere and argue that the principal issue is not the type and nature of information required to get appropriate phrase attachments but the issue of where to store the information and with what processes to apply it. SYNTACTIC APPROACHES Recent discussion of the issue of how and where to attach right-hand phrases and more generally clauses in sentence analysis was started by the claims of Frazier and Fodor 1979 . They offered two rules i Right Association which is that phrases on the right should be attached as low as possible on a syntax tree thus JOHN BOUGHT THE BOOK THAT I HAD BEEN TRYING TO OBTAIN FOR SUSAN which attaches to OBTAIN not to BOUGHT. But this rule fails for_______ JOHN BOUGHT THE BOOK FOR SUSAN which requires attachment to BOUGHT not BOOK. A second principle was then added ii Minimal Attachment as part of JOHN CARRIED THE GROCERIES FOR MARY attaching FOR MARY to the top of the tree rather than to the NP will create a tree with one less node. Shieber 1983 has an alternative analysis of this phenomenon based on a clear parsing model which produces the same effect as rule ii by preferring longer reductions in the parsing table . in the present case preferring VP V NP pp to NP - NP pp. But there are still problems with i and ii .