Open AccessRadical non-configurationality without shuffle operators: An analysis of Wambaya
Author(s) -
Emily M. Bender
Publication year - 2008
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.2008.1
Subject(s) - principle of compositionality , head driven phrase structure grammar , noun , computer science , equivalence (formal languages) , natural language processing , part of speech , word order , linguistics , valence (chemistry) , artificial intelligence , generative grammar , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics
The word order facts of radically non-configurational languages pose a challenge to HPSGapproaches which assume both that the surface order of words is the yield of the (tectogrammatical)tree and standard HPSG-style cancellation of valence lists. These languages allow discontinuous nounphrases, in which modifiers appear separated from their head nouns by arbitrarily many other wordsfrom the same clause. In this paper, I explore an analysis which preservestectogrammatical-phenogrammatical equivalence, and accounts for the word order facts of Wambaya withan analysis based on non-cancellation. This analysis is contrasted with other approaches todiscontinuous constituents and analyses of other phenomena based on non-cancellation. Finally, Iexplore the implications for current models of semantic compositionality.