Macros for the Determiners

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Determiners get a slightly more complex semantics. Here are the semantic macros for ``every'' (with the label uni) and ``a'' (with label indef):

detSem(uni,usr([Root,N1,N2,N3,N4,N5,N6,N7,N8,N9],
        [Root:lambda(N1),N1:lambda(N2),N2:forall(N3),N3:(N4 > N5),
         N4:(N6@N7),N5:(N8@N9),N6:var,N7:var,N8:var,N9:var],
        [],
        [bind(N6,Root),bind(N7,N2),bind(N8,N1),bind(N9,N2)])).

detSem(indef,usr([Root,N1,N2,N3,N4,N5,N6,N7,N8,N9],
        [Root:lambda(N1),N1:lambda(N2),N2:exists(N3),N3:(N4 & N5),
         N4:(N6@N7),N5:(N8@N9),N6:var,N7:var,N8:var,N9:var],
        [],
        [bind(N6,Root),bind(N7,N2),bind(N8,N1),bind(N9,N2)])).

These structures look quite intimidating, but if you look at the corresponding constraint graphs, you'll see that e.g. the macro for ``every'' is nothing but a description of the term . To make it easier to check that the semantic macro detSem(uni,...) given above really corresponds to this tree representation, we have decorated the tree backbone with the respective PROLOG-variables (see below on the right).

Just in order to make life easier for us from now on, we'll abbreviate the graphs for determiners as follows:

We can do this safely because the root of the subgraph is the only node we'll have to refer to below.


Aljoscha Burchardt, Alexander Koller and Stephan Walter
Version 1.2.5 (20030212)