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home / papers / 2018 / Разрешение неоднозначности сфер действия в письменных текстах (на материале английского языка)

Разрешение неоднозначности сфер действия в письменных текстах (на материале английского языка)

Summary

The paper examines how a reader of an English text determines the scope of negation in sentences with the quantifier all. For instance, a phrase with not and all can be understood in two ways: as "not all" (partial negation) or as "none" (the verb itself is negated). Written text lacks the prosody that cues the correct reading in spoken language, so the reader relies on other signals. The material was the parallel English–Russian subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus (RNC). Its Russian equivalent helps verify which reading is correct. The author manually selected 147 contexts, annotated them, and described the factors that resolve the ambiguity: the syntactic role of the all phrase, theme–rheme structure, the veridicality of the context, the sentence type (counterfactual conditional, rhetorical question), and pragmatic implicatures. It turned out that genuine ambiguity, which even a broad context does not resolve, is rare. Most often the negation applies to the quantifier. The study is a pilot one, but it is useful for NLP, in particular for semantic parsing, machine translation and negation processing, because it offers concrete contextual indicators for each of the readings.

Key points

  • Corpus: the parallel subcorpus of the RNC. Search pattern not + Verb + all with a distance of up to 3 words. Fixed expressions (not at all, after all, at all costs, etc.) were removed manually, leaving 147 contexts.
  • Distribution of readings: in 82 cases the negation applies to all, in 58 it applies to the verb or another constituent (for example, the purpose), and another 7 cases are ambiguous.
  • The "not all" reading (75 examples in quantitative non-emphatic contexts) is supported by modal predicates (18 examples with could), mental and perception predicates (18 examples: know, understand, realize…) and verbs of speech (7 examples: say, tell). However, none of these signals completely rules out the other reading.
  • The negation more often applies to the verb when all has an emphatic rather than a quantitative meaning (17 examples, of which 8 with all this and 2 with all that). The same is observed with time expressions such as all the time with punctual predicates, in the phrase sleep all night (18 examples), and also in rhetorical questions and counterfactual conditional sentences.
  • Limitations: the study is a pilot. The author left sentences with negated pronouns (nobody…) and experimental verification with native speakers for future work.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{2018,
  title = {{Разрешение неоднозначности сфер действия в письменных текстах (на материале английского языка)}},
  author = {Ю},
  booktitle = {Компьютерная лингвистика и интеллектуальные технологии: по материалам конференции «Диалог» (2018)},
  year = {2018},
  url = {https://dialogue-conf.org/ru/digest/digest2018/}
}

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