Interaction between parallel linguistic mechanisms in a modular theory of parsing based on autolexical grammar
Steven A. Gordon · 1991
A new, modular, computational linguistic theory of parsing based on Autolexical Grammar, Sadock's recent linguistic theory, is developed to achieve the following goals: (1) Modularity, simplicity, integrity, independence, and parallelism of linguistic mechanisms. (2) Effective coordination of interaction between linguistic mechanisms. (3) Sufficient computational detail to achieve these goals and simulate the parsing of a wide variety of English expressions. Computational specifics are motivated and demonstrated by detailed analyses of the recognition of morphological and syntactic variants of idioms and the parsing of expressions containing the clitic 's. Less detailed analyses of the resolution of lexical and syntactic ambiguity, the parsing of complex noun phrases, and agreement and selection restrictions are also used to motivate and demonstrate some computational specifics. Autolexical Grammar is augmented with explicit roles for lexical analysis and semantic interpretation and the replacement of its unspecified noncontiguous syntax and morphology with context-free syntactic and morphological grammars and a syntactic pattern matching algorithm. Some troublesome linguistic phenomena were shown to be handled more easily and coherently by the interaction of simple linguistic mechanisms than by their traditional solutions. In comparison, traditional solutions generally overcomplicate syntax in order to handle what are not purely syntactic phenomena.