Morphology-syntax interface for Turkish LFG

STAD Sanal Türkoloji Araştırmaları Dergisi / Electronic Journal of Turcology Researches, 2019

The theoretical grammar of Turkish is a major research area with interesting topics. An important book which is written by V. G. Guzev on the theoretical grammar of Turkish was published in Petersburg in 2015. In Guzev’s work, remarkable determinations are made on the grammar of Turkish. First of all, I would like to mention that I found this work successful. The book consists of four main headings following a preamble and a long introduction. Phonology, morphonology, morphology, and functional syntax of Turkish are investigated. Research on the understanding of many linguistic cases has been advanced, and opinions based on the foundations of the Indo-European languages have begun to be abandoned in order to create a more effective grammar in additive languages. Studies on the grammar of Turkish have also accelerated in the last decade. However, these studies were not completed unfortunately. According to Guzev, Turkish writers do not follow the linguistics developments in the world because Turkish writers think that the researches of non-native Turkish speakers would not be understandable enough. Guzev has rightness in terms of these ideas. Unfortunately, it is true that studies conducted on Turkish in the world are not followed well. The native Turkish speaker researcher may occasionally lose sight of the characteristics, functionality, and subtleties of language in a natural language environment. The non-native Turkish speaker can clearly see these functions when compared to other languages. In this respect, I believe that the studies to be conducted by considering the foreign literature will be healthier. In this article, the book is evaluated and some of the topics are discussed.

Proceedings of the Conference …, 2009

In this paper we are discussing a semi-automatic approach for developing Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) [1, 6, 9] for English. The grammar is being used in an LFG based English to Urdu machine translation system. In the traditional approach a manually developed grammar of ...

2022

Our goal is to develop a semantic theory that is equally suitable for the lexical material (words) and for the larger constructions (sentences) put together from these. In 2.1 we begin with the system of lexical categories that are in generative grammar routinely used as preterminals mediating between syntax and the lexicon. Morphology is discussed in 2.2, where subdirect composition is introduced. This notion is further developed in 2.3, where the geometric view is expanded from the standard word vectors and the voronoids introduced in Chapter 1 to include non-vectorial elements that express binary relations. These eigenspace techniques receive further use in 2.4, where some crucial relational devices of syntactic theory, thematic relations, deep cases, and kārakas are addressed. How much of syntax can be reconstructed with these is discussed in 2.5. 2.1 Lexical categories and subcategories Whether a universal system of lexical categories exists is still a widely debated question. Bloomfield, 1933, and more recently Kaufman, 2009 argued that certain languages like Tagalog have only one category. But the notion that there are at least three major categories that are universal, nouns, verbs, and adjectives, has been broadly defended (Baker, 2003; Chung, 2012; Haspelmath, 2021). 4lang subdivides verbs into two categories: intransitive U and transitive V; retaining the standard N for noun; A for adjective; and also uses D for aDverb; and G for Grammatical formative. While this rough categorization has proven useful for seeking bindings in the original 4 and in other languages, there is no theoretical claim associated to these categories, nei

Computing Research Repository, 1996

In the implementation, logic programming tool ALE (Attribute Logic Engine) which is primarily designed for implementing HPSG grammars is used. A type and structure hierarchy of Turkish language is designed. Syntactic phenomena such a s subcategorization, relative clauses, constituent order variation, adjuncts, nomina l predicates and complement-modifier relations in Turkish are analyzed. A parser is designed and implemented in ALE.

Revista española de lingüística aplicada, 2006

Grammar. Such a model deals with word formation processes from two perspectives, as a grammaticalization of the lexicon and as a lexicalization of predication structures. The first view is essentially lexicological in nature, whereas the second one is essentially syntactic. The analyses carried out in this paper will concentrate on the lexicological aspect of the model; specifically, a new proposal for the semantic representation of word formation processes is devised. Such a system of lexical representation involves designing Lexical Templates for both free and bound lexical morphemes and making use of Semantic Redundancy Rules to account for the different semantic values that a derivational pattern may have.

2009

Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2015

In general, the concept of grammar is seen as a coherent system of principles that determine the formation of the generative syntax of a language, the basic idea is that the sentence is generated as an abstract structural representation, which becomes further from the derivation based on structure, following the universal principles and specific parameters for each language. The universal knowledge and language-specific parameters enables design respective grammar of these languages from which can then be generalized to a universal grammar. This paper will analyze how our customized linguistics generalizes it more specifically in terms of terminologies, terms as ingredients, complement, adjunct, etc. The limbs of the second functional generativist treatment have changed not only the terminology, but the scope of their use in relation to the position where they are. Research topic: Syntax study on the current Albanian generalization, terms and concepts, their use in Albanian.

Projecting Morphology (edited by L Sadler and A Spencer), 2004

The paper argues for two points in relation to Turkish NLP: (i) we are better off developing and using research methodologies and tools that are not language-specifi c, although the models built with these methods and tools must certainly exploit language-specifi c thinking or technology. One way to do this is to collect distributional data at the level of morphemes. (ii) we need to incorporate semantics into the picture somehow, otherwise what we do is form recognition, or contextually deprived (or dissituated) form production. The last point raises problems from the world's morphologies (and from Turkish morphology in particular) for the current state of art in NLP, where morphological processing is usually separated from syntactic processing for practical reasons. There is no semantic motivation to separate morphological processing of compositional meaning from syntactic processing of meaning. In fact, semantic aspects indicate that we should integrate them. I will mention some attempts at the problem and suggest some lines of research.

2013

and simple X-bar schemata allows Chomsky to account for the syntactic parallelisms between these three types of expressions (verbs, DNs and GNs) in a uniform way. The idea that some DNs belong in the Lexicon rather than the syntax came to be known as the lexicalist hypothesis to derivational morphology. There are two theoretical positions within this lexicalist approach to derivational processes, which are conceptually different, though often not distinguished: (i) what is generally known as the weak lexicalist hypothesis, by which DNs are mostly lexically derived, . but which could admit some transformational derivations of D~s, and (li) what Perlmutter (1988) refers to as the 'split morphology' hypothesis, which denies the possibility that there are DNs that can be derived by means of transformations.s Some of the works dealing with these issues can be understood as advocating one or the other position. In this regard, Chomsky's "Remarks" can be read in eithe...

2005

Jaklin 2005. The case of the direct object in Turkish: Semantics, syntax and morphology. Turkic Languages 9, 3-44.

Computational Linguistics, 2008

The suitability of different parsing methods for different languages is an important topic in syntactic parsing. Especially lesser-studied languages, typologically different from the languages for which methods have originally been developed, poses interesting challenges in this respect. This article presents an investigation of data-driven dependency parsing of Turkish, an agglutinative free constituent order language that can be seen as the representative of a wider class of languages of similar type. Our investigations show that morphological structure plays an essential role in finding syntactic relations in such a language. In particular, we show that employing sublexical representations called inflectional groups, rather than word forms, as the basic parsing units improves parsing accuracy. We compare two different parsing methods, one based on a probabilistic model with beam search, the other based on discriminative classifiers and a deterministic parsing strategy, and show that the usefulness of sublexical units holds regardless of parsing method. We examine the impact of morphological and lexical information in detail and show that, properly used, this kind of information can improve parsing accuracy substantially. Applying the techniques presented in this article, we achieve the highest reported accuracy for parsing the Turkish Treebank.

Formalising Natural Languages with NooJ, 2013

Cybernetics, 1978

Proceedings of the HPSG10 Conference Université Paris Diderot, Paris 7, France. Stefan Müller (Editor), 2010

There are fascinating problems at the syntax-morphology interface which tend to be missed. I offer a brief explanation of why that may be happening, then give a Canonical Typology perspective, which brings these problems to the fore. I give examples showing that the henomena could in principle be treated either by syntactic rules (but these would be complex) or within morphology (but this would involve redundancy). Thus ‘non-autonomous’ case values, those which have no unique form but are realized by patterns of syncretism, could be handled by a rule of syntax (one with access to other features, such as number) or by morphology (with resulting systematic syncretisms). I concentrate on one of the most striking sets of data, the issue of prepositional government in Latvian, and outline a solution within Network Morphology using structured case values.