Open AccessA two-rule analysis of measure noun phrases
Author(s) -
Dan Flickinger,
Francis Bond
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2003.7
Subject(s) - noun phrase , noun , syntax , measure (data warehouse) , computer science , linguistics , natural language processing , determiner phrase , parsing , grammar , rule based machine translation , proper noun , string (physics) , artificial intelligence , mathematics , database , philosophy , mathematical physics
In this paper we present an analysis of English measure noun phrases. Measurenoun phrases exhibit both distributional idiosyncrasy, in that they appear inpositions normally filled by degree adverbs: "a ten inch long string"; andagreement discord: "ten inches is enough", "it is ten inch/*inches long".The analysis introduces one idiosyncratic construction, the Measure PhraseRule, which links together syntax and inflectional morphology. Combined withexisting rules, in particular the Noun-noun Compound Rule, the new ruleaccounts for the both the distributional and agreement idiosyncrasies. Therule has been implemented and tested in the ERG, a broad-coverage grammar ofEnglish. Our analysis supports the position that broad-coverage grammarswill necessarily contain both highly schematic and highly idiosyncraticrules.