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Negative Concord and Restructuring in Palestinian Arabic: A Comparison of TAG and CCG Analyses

Paper · 2006 · Frederick M. Hoyt

Summary

The paper studies how negative concord interacts with restructuring (clause union) in Palestinian Arabic (PA). The determiner wEla means roughly "(not) even one". Before the finite verb, or as a fragment answer, it acts as a negative quantifier. Inside the scope of an antimorphic operator such as sentential negation or "without", it behaves as a polarity item. The dependency is normally confined to a single inflected clause. A small set of trigger verbs (want, allow, try, be able/know how) lets it reach into their complements, and this can repeat recursively.

The author builds two grammar fragments and compares them. The TAG version uses Scope TAG tree sets, Kallmeyer's node-sharing relation on derivation trees, and a polarity feature that a root clause must satisfy. The CCG version adapts Hepple's bounding features and a crossed-composition slash for the clitic -š.

The conclusion is that neither formalism covers the data alone. A good account needs TAG's extended domain of locality and CCG's flexible constituency. This matters for anyone modelling scope-sensitive items that cross clause boundaries.

Key points

  • wEla-phrases have two readings. NQ-wEla appears preverbally, in fragment answers and in non-entailed postverbal slots. NPI-wEla appears under antimorphic operators (Zwarts, 1993). A preverbal wEla before negation produces double negation, and several NPI-wEla phrases can share one licensor.
  • Thematically entailed postverbal argument positions block wEla unless negation or a similar operator licenses it (following Herburger, 2001). Indicative and subjunctive complement boundaries also block it. Weaker items like (Paiy) ħada "anyone" are not blocked.
  • In the TAG analysis, locality is checked on the derivation tree. Scope sets (Kallmeyer & Joshi, 2003) are extended to PPs, and licensor and wEla must be shared-node sisters (Kallmeyer, 2005). Negation is handled by a POL feature: -š sets POL −, ma:- flips it to POL +, and root clauses must be POL +.
  • Complement category (CP vs IP) cannot single out trigger verbs. try and be able optionally take the complementizer Pınn-, while want and know exclude it. Non-trigger verbs like promise also take auxiliary trees for long-distance A-dependencies.
  • In the CCG analysis, wEla carries a penetrative feature c. Trigger verbs pass a compatible bounding feature h to their complement, while verbs like promise pass a clashing feature g. Wide-scope derivations fail on g/c clashes, and narrow-scope ones fail on polarity clashes.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. One lexical item gets a negative-quantifier or a polarity-item reading depending on its position relative to a licensor, and a pre-negation placement yields double negation.
  • I2. The notion of thematic entailment decides whether an argument slot presupposes an existing filler, and so whether a negative quantifier can sit there.
  • I3. Licensing is stated over the derivation structure rather than the surface tree, with shared-node sisterhood letting a dependency see through attached PPs and auxiliary layers.
  • I4. A lexical feature on embedding verbs marks them as transparent (h) or opaque (g) to scope-sensitive dependencies, independent of complement category.
  • I5. A clause-level polarity feature, flipped by negation morphemes and checked at the root, works as a cheap well-formedness test.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): when assigning negation in frames, treat "not even one"/"no one" items as either the negation source or a dependent of an existing negator, so double-negation cases resolve to a positive assertion.
  • I2 (world): use a per-verb "role filler is entailed" flag to decide whether a negated argument should create no entity, rather than a placeholder entity, in the text's world.
  • I3 (tree): implement scope-licensing checks as walks over UD paths that pass through designated transparent relations (e.g. xcomp chains, case-marked obliques) instead of requiring a direct head–dependent link.
  • I4 (frames): keep a small verb list (want, try, be able, let) that lets negation scope propagate into the complement frame, while verbs like promise/believe stop it.
  • I5 (back): when generating negated sentences, track a polarity feature so that any/ever-type items are only emitted where a licensor scopes over them.

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

 Institutions

🎓The University of Texas at AustinAustin · United States119 works · 57,950 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksPsychology · 1,649 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 523 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 3,066 worksSyntax & grammar formalisms · 221 works

Cite

Cite as Frederick M. Hoyt. 2006. Negative Concord and Restructuring in Palestinian Arabic: A Comparison of TAG and CCG Analyses. Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammar and Related Formalisms.

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

@inproceedings{hoyt2006negative,
  title = {{Negative Concord and Restructuring in Palestinian Arabic: A Comparison of TAG and CCG Analyses}},
  author = {Frederick M. Hoyt},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammar and Related Formalisms},
  year = {2006},
  doi = {10.3115/1654690.1654697},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1654690.1654697}
}

References

21 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  21. Frans Zwarts. 1993. Three types of polarity items. In F. Hamm and E. Hinrichs, editors, Semantics. ma:− šUft S pol+ $/S pol− $ S \N P /N P S pol− $\ × S pol− $ S pol− \N P /N P ma:− h ada: S /(S \N P ) S pol+ $/S pol− $ S pol+ /(S \N P ) S pol+ −ıš S pol− $\ × S pol− $ ma:− S pol+ $/S pol− $ Qırıft S h \N P h /(S h \N P h ) S h,pol− \N P h /(S h \N P h ) S h,pol− \N P h /N P h ma:− waQatt S pol+ $/S pol− $ S h \N P h /(S h,pol+ \N P h ) S pol− $\ × S pol− $ S h,pol− \N P h /(S h,pol+ \N P h ) S h,pol− \N P h /N P h ma:− waQatt S pol+ $/S pol− $ S h \N P h /(S h,pol+ \N P h ) S pol− $\ × S pol− $ S h,pol− \N P h /(S h,pol+ \N P h ) −ıš wEla h ada (S pol− \N P )\((S pol− \N P )/N P ) <B × < S pol− \N P >B × S pol+ \N P Figure 1: −š šæ:f-ni S pol− $\ × S pol− $ S \N P <B × S pol− /(S \N P ) >B > Figure 2: wEla kılmi (S h,pol− \N P h )\((S c,pol− \N P c )/N P c ) Ektıb S h \N P h /N P h <B × >B < S h,pol− \N P h >B S h,pol+ \N P h Figure 3: −ıš Eh ki S h \N P h /pp h wEla maQ h ada (S h,pol− \N P h )\((S c,pol− \N P c )/pp c ) <B × >B ∗ Figure 4: −ıš Eh ki S h \N P h /pp h wEla maQ h ada (S h,pol− \N P h )\((S c,pol− \N P c )/pp c ) <B × < S h,pol− \N P h ∗ Figure 5: find

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