Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Thursday May 03, 16:15, Seminar Room, Building 17

Coreferential Objects in German: Experimental Evidence on Reflexivity

While object coreference structures are possible in English, the equivalent German construction is marginal, and additionally seems not to obey Binding Condition B. Work on this thorny problem has been hindered by a lack of agreement about which structures are and are not grammatical, and by the unpredicted nature of some contrasts. In order to clarify this situation I applied the methodology of magnitude estimation (Bard et al 1996) to produce replicable grammaticality data as a basis for further work and to test competing accounts. The data reveals that none of the previous accounts we consider is wholly adequate. I show that the phenomena can be economically accounted for by a range of violable grammatical constraints on surface structure and binding, such as the Law of Increasing Members and the Antecedent Precedence Rule. I argue that the most adequate way of allowing these constraints to interact is in a constraint weighting model (following Keller 2000). I finish by some discussion of some implications of this data type and interaction model for grammatical theory. In particular I shall argue that all syntactic constraints are truly violable, unlike in for example OT.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Frank Keller.