Exercise 9, Grammar Development

For this exercise, base yourselves on grammar8.lfg. This grammar already contains a rule for CP and for infinitive VPs as well as some control verbs.

Long Distance Dependencies, Shuffle Operator

Long Distance Dependencies

Expand your grammar to deal with long-distance dependencies. (you can read up on them some more in Chapter 14 the Dalrymple textbook).

Introduce an extra Stop (stands for S topic) (Stop --> NP (COMMA) S) and annotate the topicalized constituent as shown below.

Functional Uncertainty Annotation

Add the functional uncertainty equation below to the NP preceding the S.

(^ TOPIC) = ! 
(^ {XCOMP|COMP}* {OBJ|OBJ2}) = !

You should be able to parse (at least) the following sentences.

1. Kim likes beans.
2. Beans, Kim likes.
3. Beans, Kim wants Mary to like.
4. Beans, John persuaded Mary to want to eat.
5. Beans, John wanted Mary to think that Bill persuaded Kim to eat.
6. Beans, John thought that Mary wanted Bill to think that Kim wants to eat.

Shuffle Operator

The shuffle operator is written as a comma. For example the rule below has the effect of allowing any (or no) number of NPs interspersed with any (or no) numbers of PPs.

S --> NP*, PP*. 

Examples:

• NP PP NP
• NP NP NP
• PP PP PP
• PP NP PP
• NP NP PP
• etc.

For this exercise, rather than working with an actual language, we use a made up language and concentrate on modeling word order (scrambling).

Start a new grammar (you can copy and paste some from grammar8.lfg).

Write up a lexicon that contains the following items:

• Nouns: tam ('garden'), plim ('gorilla'), tipf ('banana'), bobo ('baboon')
• Verbs: taotao ('eat'), guagua ('give')
• Preposition: ya ('in'), di ('to')

Write rules that model a verb-final language with free word order among the NPs and PPs. The grammar should be able to parse the following.

• plim tipf taotao
• tipf plim taotao
• tipf ya tam plim taotao
• ya tam tipf taotao
• plim di bobo tipf guagua
• di bobo plim tipf guagua
• bobo ya tam tipf di plim guagua
• tipf di bobo ya tam plim guagua

Note how the c-structure and the f-structure separation works. For example, even though the first two sentences have a different word order, they should both correspond to the same f-structure.

Relevant Reading Material

Dalrymple (2001), Chapter 14

XLE Documentation: shuffle operator