Multi-word expressions (MWEs) are challenging for grammatical theories and grammar development since they blur the traditional distinction between the lexicon and the grammar, and vary in the degree of idiosyncrasy with respect to their semantic, syntactic, and morphological behavior. Nevertheless, the need to incorporate MWEs into grammars is unquestionable, especially in light of estimates claiming that MWEs account for approximately half of the entries in the lexicon. In this study we focus on verbal MWEs in Modern Hebrew: we consider different types of this class of MWEs, and propose an analysis in the framework of HPSG. Moreover, we incorporate this analysis into HeGram, a deep linguistic processing grammar of Modern Hebrew.
Existing approaches to the representation of argument structure in grammar tend to focus either on semantics or on syntax. Our goal in this paper is to strike the right balance between the two levels by proposing an analysis that maintains the independence of the syntactic and semantic aspects of argument structure, and, at the same time, captures the interplay between the two levels. Our proposal is set in the context of the development of a large-scale grammar of Modern Hebrew within the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Consequently, an additional challenge it faces is to reconcile two conflicting desiderata: to be both linguistically coherent and realistic in terms of the grammar engineering effort. We present a novel representation of argument structure that is fully implemented in HPSG, and demonstrate its many benefits to the coherence of our Hebrew grammar. We also highlight the additional dimensions of linguistic generalization that our proposal provides, which we believe are also applicable to grammars of other languages.KEYWORDS: argument structure, Hebrew grammar, HPSG, Modern Hebrew, semantic selection, syntactic selection, syntax-semantics interface 1. INTRODUCTION Syntax and semantics play different roles in the relationship between a predicate and its arguments. From a semantic perspective, predicates require different [1] This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no 505/11). We are indebted to Petter Haugereid for his contribution to this project in its earlier stages, and to Tali Arad Greshler and Adam Przepiórkowski for their help and advice with previous drafts of this paper. We are grateful to the Journal of Linguistics anonymous reviewers for many helpful and constructive comments. All remaining errors and misconceptions are, of course, our own. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Chuck Fillmore (1929) and Ivan Sag (1949-2013.Abbreviations used in this paper for agreement are 1/2/3 = person; S/P = number; F/M = gender. In addition ACC = accusative case. arguments to assume particular semantic functions or roles. This is referred to as semantic selection (s-selection) (Pesetsky 1996). Syntactic selection (c-selection) determines the syntactic categories that realize the predicate's arguments. A related notion, subcategorization, pertains to the idea that lexemes, which are categorized according to syntactic categories, can be further subcategorized according to the type and number of syntactic complements that they require. Finally, linking describes the matching between arguments and syntactic functions. Thus, for example, active verbs link their Agent argument with the Subject role, while with passive verbs, the Patient argument assumes this role.The question of whether s-selection, c-selection, and linking are basic or whether one is reducible to another has been worrying linguists since at least Grimshaw (1979), who argues that semantic selection and syntactic selection are two independent sets of restrictions. She focuses on the se...
We present the Hebrew Essay Corpus: an annotated corpus of Hebrew language argumentative essays authored by prospective higher-education students. The corpus includes both essays by native speakers, written as part of the psychometric exam that is used to assess their future success in academic studies; and essays authored by non-native speakers, with three different native languages, that were written as part of a language aptitude test. The corpus is uniformly encoded and stored. The non-native essays were annotated with target hypotheses whose main goal is to make the texts amenable to automatic processing (morphological and syntactic analysis). The corpus is available for research purposes upon request. We describe the corpus and the error correction and annotation schemes used in its analysis. In addition to introducing this new resource, we discuss the challenges of identifying and analyzing non-native language use in general, and propose various ways for dealing with these challenges.
We show how linguistic grammars of two different yet related languages can be developed and implemented in parallel, with language-independent fragments serving as shared resources, and language-specific ones defined separately for each language. The two grammars in the focus of this paper are of Modern Hebrew and Modern Standard Arabic, and the basic infrastructure, or core, of the grammars is based on "standard" HPSG. We identify four types of relations that exist between the grammars of two languages and demonstrate how the different types of relations can be implemented in parallel grammars with maximally shared resources. The examples pertain to the grammars of Modern Hebrew and Modern Standard Arabic, yet similar issues and considerations are applicable to other pairs of languages that have some degree of similarity.
In this paper we investigate the status of control constructions in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). MSA has several embedded clause constructions, some of which resemble control in English (and other languages). However, these constructions exhibit some notable differences. Chief among them is the fact that the embedded verb carries agreement features that can indicate both coreference and disjoint reference between a matrix argument and the understood subject of the complement clause. We conducted a thorough corpus-based investigation of such constructions, with a special focus on a search for obligatory control in the language. We show that our findings contradict accepted generalizations (and predictions) proposed by state-of-the-art theories of control, as they indicate that there are no "real" control predicates in MSA. We outline an HPSG analysis that accounts for the MSA data.
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