Theories of Case

Butt, Miriam

doi:10.1017/cbo9781139164696

Cited by 132 publications

(40 citation statements)

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“…Historically, 4lang falls in the AI/KR tradition, following on the work of Quillian (1969), Schank (1975), and more recently Banarescu et al (2013). Linguistically, it is closest to Wierzbicka (1972), Goddard (2002) and to modern theories of case grammar and linking theory (see Butt (2006) for a summary). Computationally, 4lang is in the finite state tradition (Koskenniemi, 1983), except it relies on an extension of finite state automata (FSA) introduced by Eilenberg (1974) to machines.…”

Section: Langmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Semantic Similarity of Words Using Concept Networks

Recski¹,

Iklodi²,

Pajkossy³

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP

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We present a state-of-the-art algorithm for measuring the semantic similarity of word pairs using novel combinations of word embeddings, WordNet, and the concept dictionary 4lang. We evaluate our system on the SimLex-999 benchmark data. Our top score of 0.76 is higher than any published system that we are aware of, well beyond the average inter-annotator agreement of 0.67, and close to the 0.78 average correlation between a human rater and the average of all other ratings, suggesting that our system has achieved nearhuman performance on this benchmark. IntroductionWe present a hybrid system for measuring the semantic similarity of word pairs. The system relies both on standard word embeddings, the WordNet database, and features derived from the 4lang concept dictionary, a set of concept graphs built from entries in monolingual dictionaries of English. 4lang-based features improve the performance of systems using only word embeddings and/or WordNet, our top configurations achieve state-of-the-art results on the SimLex-999 data, which has recently become a popular benchmark of word similarity metrics.In Section 1 we summarize earlier work on measuring word similarity and review the latest results achieved on the SimLex-999 data. Section 2 describes our experimental setup, Sections 2.1 and 2.2 documents the features obtained using word embeddings and WordNet. In Section 3 we briefly introduce the 4lang resources and the formalism it uses for encoding the meaning of words as directed graphs of concepts, then document our efforts to develop novel 4lang-based similarity features. Besides improving the performance of existing systems for measuring word similarity, the goal of the present project is to examine the potential of 4lang representations in representing non-trivial lexical relationships that are beyond the scope of word embeddings and standard linguistic ontologies.Section 4 presents our results and provides rough error analysis. Section 5 offers some conclusions and plans for future work. All software presented in this paper is available for download under an MIT license at

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Section: Langmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Semantic Similarity of Words Using Concept Networks

Recski¹,

Iklodi²,

Pajkossy³

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP

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show abstract

“…In sum, the accusative vs. ergative alignment hypothesis simply does not match up with any known historical record (again, see Butt 2006 for some discussion). We suggest that the accusative versus ergative alignment hypothesis is deeply flawed precisely because it does not consider the vast and complex semantic functional load of case markers and that an understanding of this complex semantic picture is fundamental for understanding the documented historical changes.…”

Section: Ergativity and The Alignment Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 95%

“…The numbering in the left-most column provides the numbers by which the case markers are referred to in P" an : ini's grammar of Sanskrit (Katre 1987;Böhtlingk 1839Böhtlingk -1840, the right-most column approximates the function of the case markers by using the names coming out of the well-established Graeco-Roman tradition (cf. Butt 2006).…”

Section: Redevelopment Versus Loss Of Case Markersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The development of an ergative case is generally assumed to be indicative of a shift or alignment change between grammatical relations and case marking in the entire case system of the language. This case shift has been proposed for a number of languages, namely: Inuktitut (an Eskimo language), Polynesian and Indo-Iranian (for a summary and references, see Butt 2006). The idea is that languages make a fundamental structural difference as to how they group or align the grammatical relations subject and object.…”

Section: Ergativity and The Alignment Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

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The redevelopment of Indo-Aryan case systems from a lexical semantic perspective

Butt

Ahmed

2010

Morphology

Self Cite

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The original case system found in Sanskrit (Old Indo-Aryan) was lost in Middle Indo-Aryan and then reinvented in most of the modern New Indo-Aryan (NIA) languages. This paper suggests that: (1) a large factor in the redevelopment of the NIA case systems is the expression of systematic semantic contrasts; (2) the precise distribution of the newly innovated case markers can only be understood by taking their original spatial semantics into account and how this originally spatial semantics came to be used primarily for marking the core participants of a sentence (e.g., agents, patients, experiencers, recipients). Furthermore, given that case markers were not innovated all at once, but successively, we suggest a model in which already existing case markers block or compete with newer ones, thus giving rise to differing particular instantiations of one and the same originally spatial postposition across closely related languages.

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“…Potentially involving aspects of semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology, case has always been a central concern for grammatical theories of every stripe (see e.g., Butt 2006 for an overview and references). Starting in the early 1980s, generative theoretical frameworks have treated abstract syntactic capital-'C' Case as an aspect of Universal Grammar, varying only in its language-specific morpho-phonological realization.…”

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confidence: 99%

Introduction: Case variation and change in the Nordic languages

Parrott

2012

Nord J Linguist

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Shortly after arriving in Copenhagen five years ago, I realized what many linguists have long understood: the case situation in the Nordic languages is formidably complex. Of course, the broad outlines of inter-speaker (or, cross-linguistic) variation in Nordic nominal case inflection are well known. Within two major language families, (North) Germanic and Uralic, there are dozens of closely related language varieties. The Finnic and Sami languages of Uralic have adpositional case systems, while the North Germanic languages can be further subdivided into the Mainland and Insular groups, partially on the basis of their different case systems. The latter group, namely Icelandic, Faroese, and Älvdalian (which is spoken in a fairly isolated rural community in the interior of Sweden), has ‘rich’ inflectional case morphology on a range of elements comprising nominal phrases, including articles, determiners, demonstratives, nouns, pronouns, wh-words, and more. The former group, namely Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, are ‘case-poor’, maintaining only a vestige of their historically rich case morphology on a subset of personal pronouns, which have Nominative, Oblique, and Possessive forms. Furthermore, certain varieties of Swedish and Norwegian retain vestigial Dative forms of clitic pronouns.

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Theories of Case

Cited by 132 publications

References 0 publications

Measuring Semantic Similarity of Words Using Concept Networks

Measuring Semantic Similarity of Words Using Concept Networks

The redevelopment of Indo-Aryan case systems from a lexical semantic perspective

Introduction: Case variation and change in the Nordic languages

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