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  • From: dwashbur AT nyx.net
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Generation grammar and b-hebrew
  • Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2010 11:59:49 -0700

James,

On 19 Jun 2010 at 14:37, James Christian wrote:

>
> Hi, by syntax I'm assuming you mean the constituent structure of the
> sentence. e.g. things like:
> S --> NP VP
> VP --> V NP
> NP --> (Det) N
> In the LFG formalism such rules are referred to as the c-structure
> of a sentence. What are your
> feelings about functional distinctions? e.g. consider the following
> sentences:
> 1) Mary hit the dog on the head
> 2) Mary hit the dog in the park
> 3) Mary hit the dog on Monday
> 4) Mary hit the dog on the head in the park on Monday
> Sentences 1, 2 and 3 could be generated with similar c-structures
> but the PP's in each clearly
> have different functional meanings. That is to say that the PP in 1
> indicates the part of the dog
> that was hit, the PP in 2 indicates where the dog was and the PP in
> 3 indicates the time the dog
> was hit such that we can combine the three different functions and
> produce unambiguous
> sentence 4.
> For this reason I find a c-structure definition of PP's to be
> inadequate. Different PP's clearly have
> different functions. The most common functions being temporal PP's
> and locative PP's. We even
> see that there is some grammatical structure to the way that these
> PP's can be used. Consider
> the following sentences:
> 5) Mary hit the dog on Monday on the head in the park
> 6) Mary hit the dog in the park on Monday on the head
> 7) Mary hit the dog on the head on Monday in the park
> While the common meaning behind sentences 4, 5, 6 and 7 can be
> extracted by a native
> speaker of English some version of the sentence is more acceptable
> than others as ranking
> experiments would show.

This is precisely why I go with a strict separation between syntax and
semantics. The
internal structure of the PP is the same regardless of what it "means":

PP -> P NP

This phrase structure rule (the same as your c-structure as far as I know, I
just use an older
term because I'm an older term myself ;-) describes virtually all
prepositional phrases in BH.
Once we start looking at function or meaning, we're out of the realm of
syntax.
Syntactically, 5, 6 and 7 differ in the order of the PP's and nothing else.
The order of these
PP's is determined by meaning/semantics, i.e. what makes the most "sense" to
the speaker
and hearer, but that is not a syntactic decision. Syntactically all three
are well-formed: NP
subject, VP predicate with NP direct object followed by a string of properly
formed adjuncts
(in this case, PP's).

Does that clear it up? I believe this approach can be vastly useful for
discovering a
generative grammar of BH because it takes us down to the very basic structure
of the
language and, as you suggested in a separate post, works from the bottom up
rather than
the reverse.


Dave Washburn

http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur




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