Exercise 10.1

Look at the semantics construction in Section 10.4.4 again. Work through the functional applications and -reductions required to build the VP and S representations. Make sure you understand the role-reversing idea used in the TV semantic representation.

Exercise 10.2

Find a suitable -expression for the determiner ``no'' and add it to our implementation of -calculus. Test your solution with sentences like ``No man walks.''

Extend semanticDCG.pl accordingly.

[Hint: Start by writing down the formulas for ``A witch flies.'' and ``Every witch flies.'' and comparing them. Then trace back how the difference between these formulas is reflected in the determiner representations. Finally, write down the formula for ``No witch flies.'', compare it to the other ones and make according changes to one of the two determiner representations already there.]

Exercise 10.3

Starting off from our treatment of transitive verbs (Section 10.4.4), how would you handle ditransitive verbs such as ``offer''? Give a semantic representation for ``offer'', as well as semantically annotated grammar rules to analyse sentences like ``A witch offers Harry a broomstick.''

Exercise 10.4

[Project]

This exercise is about extending the chart parser from Chapter 8 such that it produces semantic representations. Here's a simplified version of the grammar ourEng.pl that we used there: simplifiedEng.pl . This simplified version contains only the kind of constructions that we already know how to deal with semantically.

1. Extend the phrasal rules of this grammar with arguments for semantic construction along the lines of semanticDCG.pl .

2. Add a semantic representation to each lexical entry as a third argument. Use Prolog variables for the -bound variables.

3. Now extend the chartparser from Chapter 8 to deal with the semantic information. To get rid of the Prolog variables in the lexical entries, just add a call to vars2atoms/1 immediately after the lexicon is accessed in process_chart_bottomup/0.

4. Add relative clauses to the grammar. For the syntactic part, just have a look at ourEng.pl . As regards the semantics: The predication from the relative clause should simply be conjoined to the predication from the noun that is modified. For instance, the representation assigned to ``man who walks'' should look like this when fully -reduced:

   

   So what you have to do is think of a representation for the relative pronouns that leads to this result when combined with the representations for ``walks'' (that is ) and ``man'' (that is ) in the order determined by the syntax tree.