Transitive Adjectives: A Case of Categorial Reanalysis

Maling, Joan

doi:10.1007/978-94-009-6989-6_8

Cited by 94 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Maling [29] discusses the three words near, like, and worth, arguing that these words were historically clearly adjectives, but that with the loss of case marking in English, like and worth shifted syntactic category to become prepositions (the more appropriate category for uninflected words that take an NP complement), while near is perhaps the only surviving case of a transitive adjective in English. In various footnotes, two other candidate surviving transitive adjectives are suggested: opposite and due.…”

Section: Transitive Adjectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Part-of-Speech Tagging from 97% to 100%: Is It Time for Some Linguistics?

Manning

2011

Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing

247

144

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Abstract. I examine what would be necessary to move part-of-speech tagging performance from its current level of about 97.3% token accuracy (56% sentence accuracy) to close to 100% accuracy. I suggest that it must still be possible to greatly increase tagging performance and examine some useful improvements that have recently been made to the Stanford Part-of-Speech Tagger. However, an error analysis of some of the remaining errors suggests that there is limited further mileage to be had either from better machine learning or better features in a discriminative sequence classifier. The prospects for further gains from semisupervised learning also seem quite limited. Rather, I suggest and begin to demonstrate that the largest opportunity for further progress comes from improving the taxonomic basis of the linguistic resources from which taggers are trained. That is, from improved descriptive linguistics. However, I conclude by suggesting that there are also limits to this process. The status of some words may not be able to be adequately captured by assigning them to one of a small number of categories. While conventions can be used in such cases to improve tagging consistency, they lack a strong linguistic basis. Isn't Part-of-Speech Tagging a Solved Task?At first glance, current part-of-speech taggers work rapidly and reliably, with per-token accuracies of slightly over 97% [1][2][3][4]. Looked at more carefully, the story is not quite so rosy. This evaluation measure is easy both because it is measured per-token and because you get points for every punctuation mark and other tokens that are not ambiguous. It is perhaps more realistic to look at the rate of getting whole sentences right, since a single bad mistake in a sentence can greatly throw off the usefulness of a tagger to downstream tasks such as dependency parsing. Current good taggers have sentence accuracies around 55-57%, which is a much more modest score. Accuracies also drop markedly when there are differences in topic, epoch, or writing style between the training and operational data.Still, the perception has been that same-epoch-and-domain part-of-speech tagging is a solved problem, and its accuracy cannot really be pushed higher. I

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Section: Transitive Adjectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…[29] showed that many of the criteria that people often use for part of speech are actually sensitive to semantic sorts. Are treebankers mainly influenced by semantic function or are they really picking out structural categories?…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Part-of-Speech Tagging from 97% to 100%: Is It Time for Some Linguistics?

Manning

2011

Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing

247

144

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“…This is of course unusual for English, and worth has been alternatively analysed as a preposition(Maling, 1983). Unlike other prepositions, however, worth is not used to introduce adverbial phrases, and, like adjectives, worth still has comparative and superlative uses with more and most…”

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confidence: 97%

Analysing reanalysis

Smet

2009

Lingua

108

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Reanalysis, as understood in traditional historical linguistics, lacks explanatory force as a mechanism of language change, because the assumption that reanalysis works through ambiguity is logically flawed, and because reanalysis postulates a shift from an old to a new representation without specifying the source of the new representation. Therefore, two cases of syntactic reanalysis are examined to produce a more convincing picture of how reanalysis operates. One is the development of the English adjectives worth and worthwhile when used with gerund clauses. The other is the emergence of the English for. . .to-infinitive. On the basis of these case-studies it is shown that reanalysis can be decomposed into more basic mechanisms of change. These mechanisms involve 'category-internal change' resulting from semantic change, 'categorial incursion' through analogy, and 'automation'. Each of these underlying mechanisms obtain additional plausibility from the fact that they are firmly based in synchronic language use as understood in current usage-based models. One consequence is that reanalysis itself becomes to some extent epiphenomenal to the more basic mechanisms. # The problem and its ramificationsAs a mechanism of linguistic change, reanalysis has an important share in explaining the syntactic changes that take place in language history. Along with analogy, reanalysis is commonly considered one of the two principle languageinternal mechanisms of syntactic change (e.g. Harris and Campbell, 1995;Hopper and Traugott, 2003). Essentially, while analogy works across syntagms, involving the extension of a form from one syntactic environment to another, reanalysis occurs within syntagms and causes the assignment of new syntactic representations to existing surface forms.The following more precise description of reanalysis (conforming to the definitions in Harris, 2003;Harris and Campbell, 1995;Langacker, 1977;Timberlake, 1977) is more or less commonly accepted. As stated, reanalysis takes place on the syntagmatic level of language, causing a single surface sequence of linguistic elements to receive a new syntactic and semantic interpretation. This happens as an alternative analysis is assigned to an existing surface sequence in ambiguous environments. The immediate result is a split between an old representation and a new one for the same surface sequence; later, the newly established representation may manifest itself in new surface sequences

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“…Le premier argument concerne la csélection : les verbes sélectionnant les propositions réduites peuvent contraindre le prédicat de la proposition réduite : (27) Stowell propose d'expliquer ces données par le fait que le verbe peut choisir la catégorie lexicale du prédicat de la proposition réduite. Cependant, une partie des contrastes mis en évidence par Stowell peuvent être attribués au fait que seem et consider requièrent un prédicat scalaire (Maling, 1983 ;Kitagawa, 1985 ;Matushansky, 2002b), et donc à un facteur sémantique plutôt que syntaxique. Néanmoins, l'exemple (27c) suggère que le problème ne se réduit pas complètement à la sémantique : en fonction du dialecte (américain vs britannique), un prédicat nominal est interdit avec seem et consider.…”

Section: La Syntaxe De La Prédicationunclassified

Les adjectifs – Une introduction

Matushansky¹

2005

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Transitive Adjectives: A Case of Categorial Reanalysis

Cited by 94 publications

References 6 publications

Part-of-Speech Tagging from 97% to 100%: Is It Time for Some Linguistics?

Part-of-Speech Tagging from 97% to 100%: Is It Time for Some Linguistics?

Analysing reanalysis

Les adjectifs – Une introduction

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