Clausal coordination and coordinate ellipsis in a model of the speaker
Speaker:Gerard Kempen
Institution:Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen/Cognitive Psychology Unit, Leiden University
Abstract:
This paper consists of a (psycho)linguistic, a corpus-linguistic, and a computational section. I first present a psycholinguistically inspired approach to the syntax of clause-level coordination and coordinate ellipsis. It departs from the assumption that coordinations are structurally similar to so-called appropriateness repairs -- an important type of self-repairs in spontaneous speech. Coordinate structures and appropriateness repairs can both be viewed as "update" constructions. Updating is defined as a special sentence production mode that efficiently revises or augments existing sentential structure in response to modifications in the speaker's communicative intention. This perspective is shown to offer an empirically satisfactory and theoretically parsimonious account of two prominent types of coordinate ellipsis, in particular Forward Conjunction Reduction (FCR) and Gapping (including Long-Distance Gapping and Subgapping). They are analyzed as different manifestations of "incremental updating" -- efficient updating of only part of the existing sentential structure. Based on empirical data from Dutch and German, novel treatments are proposed for both types of clausal coordinate ellipsis. Two other forms of coordinate ellipsis -- SGF ("Subject Gap in Finite clauses with fronted verb"), and Backward Conjunction Reduction (BCR; also known as Right Node Raising or RNR) -- are shown to be incompatible with the notion of incremental updating. Alternative theoretical interpretations of these phenomena are proposed.
In the corpus-linguistic section, I describe the results of an extensive exploration of the TIGER treebank -- a syntactically annotated corpus of about 50,000 newspaper sentences. I report (1) frequency data for the four patterns of coordinate ellipsis, and (2) several rarely (but regularly) occurring "fringe deviations" from the coordinate ellipsis phenomena covered by the theory proposed above.
In the computational section, I sketch ELLEIPO, a sentence generation module (implemented in JAVA, with German and Dutch as target languages) that takes non-elliptical coordinated clauses as input and returns all reduced versions licensed by coordinate ellipsis. A demo can be given after the talk.
References
Harbusch, Karin & Kempen, Gerard (2006). ELLEIPO: A module that
computes coordinative ellipsis for language generators that don't. In:
EACL-2006: 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association
for Computational Linguistics (Trento, Italy; April 2006).
Harbusch, Karin & Kempen, Gerard (2007). Clausal coordinate ellipsis
in German: The TIGER treebank as a source of evidence. Proceedings of
the Sixteenth Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA
2007, Tartu, Estonia, May 2007).
Kempen, Gerard (in press). Clausal coordination and coordinate
ellipsis in a model of the speaker. Linguistics.