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Graf (2017) warns that every syntactic formalism faces a severe overgeneration problem because of the hidden power of subcategorization. Any constraint definable in monadic second-order logic can be compiled into the category system so that it is indirectly enforced as part of subcategorization. Not only does this kind of feature coding deprive syntactic proposals of their empirical bite, it also undermines computational efforts to limit syntactic formalisms via subregular complexity. This paper presents a subregular solution to feature coding. Instead of features being a cheap resource that comes for free, features must be assigned by a transduction. In particular, category features must be assigned by an input strictly local (ISL) tree-tot-tree transduction, defined here for the first time. The restriction to ISL transductions correctly rules out various deviant category systems.
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This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2026
Are syntactic categories ISL-2 inferrable? A corpus study
We use the MG treebank of Torr (2017) to investigate the conjecture in Graf (2020) that category systems are ISL-2 inferrable. A category system is ISL-2 inferrable iff the category feature of every lexical item can be jointly inferred from phonological exponents of both the item itself and either its selecting head or the arguments it selects. If correct, this conjecture would greatly limit the overgeneration problem posed by subcategorization mechanisms. Our corpus study finds that the conjecture is largely borne out, with only a few exceptions attested in the corpus. However, we also observe that it holds even for features that aren't expected to be inferrable in this manner, and we demonstrate that inferrability can arise merely from language datasets displaying Zipfian distributions. We conclude that category systems in natural languages may well be ISL-2 inferrable, but that this could be due to extragrammatical factors.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1845344
- PAR ID:
- 10608501
- Publisher / Repository:
- University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
- Volume:
- 8
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2834-1007
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- category systems subregular linguistics Minimalist Grammars corpus study syntax
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Other: application/pdf
- Right(s):
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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