Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2012 / Not as Awful as it Seems: Explaining German Case through Computational Experiments in Fluid Construction Grammar

Not as Awful as it Seems: Explaining German Case through Computational Experiments in Fluid Construction Grammar

Summary

The paper challenges the widespread view that syncretism in German case forms is merely an accidental by-product of phonetic and morphological change. Instead, the author proposes a functional explanation: the paradigm changes in ways that reduce the search space during parsing and the cognitive effort required for interpretation. To test this, a bidirectional grammar that both parses and produces sentences is built in the Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) formalism. Instead of costly disjunctive features, it uses a distinctive feature matrix, which considerably narrows the search tree. Three variants of the definite article paradigm were embedded in turn into a grammar of present-day High German: the modern one, the Old High German one, and the Texas German dialect one. For each, the proportion of ambiguous utterances was computed under different sets of grammatical cues. Taken on its own, the article points to participant roles most reliably in the Old High German system. However, once gender, number and subject–verb agreement are taken into account, the modern paradigm yields a comparable result with half as many forms. The work links morphological evolution to language-processing efficiency and shows how the way a grammar is represented affects computational complexity.

Key points

  • The modern German definite article has 6 distinct forms (der, die, das, den, dem, des), whereas the Old High German one had 12. Nevertheless, when other cues are taken into account, both systems yield a similar level of ambiguity.
  • A disjunctive feature representation (following Karttunen, 1984) forces the parser to branch even on the unambiguous sentence "Die Kinder gaben der Lehrerin die Zeichnung". Feature matrices parse the same sentence with almost no superfluous branches, even though the algorithm is the same: depth-first search and general unification.
  • The comparison was carried out in four experimental configurations (E1–E4). The proportion of ambiguous utterances ranges from roughly 78% to 3%, depending on the paradigm and the set of cues.
  • In Texas German (Boas, 2009), the accusative and dative cases have merged, and even with all cues more than 20% of utterances remain ambiguous. Hence the prediction: other means, in particular word order, should become more prominent in this dialect. Something similar has already been attested in Low German dialects (Shrier, 1965).
  • The author calls for abandoning the strict division into competence and performance and for seeking explanations in evolutionary linguistics (Steels). An interactive demonstration is available at fcg-net.org.

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

Cite as van Trijp, Remi. 2012. Not as Awful as it Seems: Explaining German Case through Computational Experiments in Fluid Construction Grammar. Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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

@inproceedings{remi2012not,
  title = {{Not as Awful as it Seems: Explaining German Case through Computational Experiments in Fluid Construction Grammar}},
  author = {van Trijp, Remi},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2012},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/E12-1084/}
}

References

44 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Farrell Ackerman, James P. Blevins, and Robert Malouf. Parts and wholes: Implicative patterns in inflectional paradigms. In J.P. Blevins and J. Blevins, editors, Analogy in Grammar: Form and Acquisition, pages 54–81. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011. find
  2. Matthew Baerman. Case syncretism. In Andrej Malchukov and Andrew Spencer, editors, The Oxford Handbook of Case, chapter 14, pages 219–230. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009. find
  3. J. Barðdal. The development of case in germanic. In J. Barðdal and S. Chelliah, editors, The Role of Semantics and Pragmatics in the Development of Case, pages 123–159. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2009. find
  4. Manfred Bierwisch. Syntactic features in morphology: General problems of so-called pronominal inflection in German. In To Honour Roman Jakobson, pages 239–270. Mouton De Gruyter, Berlin, 1967. find
  5. James Blevins. Syncretism and paradigmatic opposition. Linguistics and Philosophy, 18:113– 152, 1995. find
  6. Joris Bleys, Kevin Stadler, and Joachim De Beule. Search in linguistic processing. In Luc Steels, editor, Design Patterns in Fluid Construction Grammar. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2011. find
  7. Hans C. Boas. Case loss in Texas German: The influence of semantic and pragmatic factors. In J. Barðdal and S. Chelliah, editors, The Role of Semantics and Pragmatics in the Development of Case, pages 347–373. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2009a. find
  8. Hans C. Boas. The Life and Death of Texas German, volume 93 of Publication of the The American Dialect Society. Duke University Press, Durham, 2009b. find
  9. David Carter. Efficient disjunctive unification for bottom-up parsing. In Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 70–75. ACL, 1990. find
  10. Ann Copestake. Implementing Typed Feature Structure Grammars. CSLI Publications, Stanford, 2002. find
  11. Berthold Crysmann. Syncretism in german: A unified approach to underspecification, indeterminacy, and likeness of case. In Stefan Müller, editor, Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, pages 91–107, Stanford, 2005. CSLI Publications. find
  12. Mary Dalrymple, Tracy Holloway King, and Louisa Sadler. Indeterminacy by underspecification. Journal of Linguistics, 45:31–68, 2009. find
  13. Michael Daniels. On a type-based analysis of feature neutrality and the coordination of unlikes. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on HPSG, pages 137–147, Stanford, 2001. CSLI. find
  14. Joachim De Beule. A formal deconstruction of Fluid Construction Grammar. In Luc Steels, editor, Computational Issues in Fluid Construction Grammar. Springer Verlag, Berlin, 2012. find
  15. Daniel P. Flickinger. On building a more efficient grammar by exploiting types. Natural Language Engineering, 6(1):15–28, 2000. our card
  16. Jonathan Ginzburg and Ivan A. Sag. Interrogative Investigations: the Form, the Meaning, and Use of English Interrogatives. CSLI Publications, Stanford, 2000. find
  17. Adele E. Goldberg. Constructions At Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006. find
  18. John T. Hale. The information conveyed by words in sentences. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 32(2):101–123, 2003. find
  19. John A. Hawkins. Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004. find
  20. Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva. Language Contact and Grammatical Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005. find
  21. Wolfgang Heinz and Johannes Matiasek. Argument structure and case assignment in german. In John Nerbonne, Klaus Netter, and Carl Pollard, editors, German in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, volume 46 of CSLI Lecture Notes, pages 199–236. CSLI Publications, Stanford, 1994. find
  22. R.J.P. Ingria. The limits of unification. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Meeting of the ACL, pages 194–204, 1990. find
  23. T. Florian Jaeger and Harry Tily. On language ‘utility’: Processing complexity and communicative efficiency. WIREs: Cognitive Science, 2(3):323–335, 2011. find
  24. L. Karttunen. Features and values. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Stanford, 1984. find
  25. Jürgen Lenerz. Zur Abfolge nominaler Satzglieder im Deutschen. Narr, Tübingen, 1977. find
  26. Martin Loetzsch. Tools for grammar engineering. In Luc Steels, editor, Computational Issues in Fluid Construction Grammar. Springer Verlag, Berlin, 2012. find
  27. Vanessa Micelli. Field topology and information structure: A case study for German constituent order. In Luc Steels, editor, Computational Issues in Fluid Construction Grammar. Springer Verlag, Berlin, 2012. find
  28. Gereon Müller. Remarks on nominal inflection in German. In Ingrid Kaufmann and Barbara Stiebels, editors, More than Words: A Festschrift for Dieter Wunderlich, pages 113– 145. Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 2002. find
  29. Stefan Müller. An HPSG-analysis for free relative clauses in german. Grammars, 2(1):53– 105, 1999. find
  30. Stefan Müller. Case in German – towards and HPSG analysis. In Tibor Kiss and Detmar Meurers, editors, Constraint-Based Approaches to Germanic Syntax. CSLI, Stanford, 2001. find
  31. Allan Ramsay. Disjunction without tears. Computational Linguistics, 16(3):171–174, 1990. find
  32. Ivan A. Sag. Coordination and underspecification. In Jongbok Kom and Stephen Wechsler, editors, Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on HPSG, Stanford, 2003. CSLI. find
  33. Ivan A. Sag and Thomas Wasow. Performance-compatible competence grammar. In Robert D. Borsley and Kersti Börjars, editors, Non-Transformational Syntax: Formal and Explicit Models of Grammar. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2011. find
  34. Martha Shrier. Case systems in German dialects. Language, 41(3):420–438, 1965. find
  35. Luc Steels. Constructivist development of grounded construction grammars. In Walter Daelemans, editor, Proceedings 42nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 9–19, Barcelona, 2004. find
  36. Luc Steels, editor. Design Patterns in Fluid Construction Grammar. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2011. find
  37. Luc Steels, editor. Computational Issues in Fluid Construction Grammar. Springer, Berlin, 2012a. find
  38. Luc Steels. Self-organization and selection in cultural language evolution. In Luc Steels, editor, Experiments in Cultural Language Evolution. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2012b. find
  39. Luc Steels and Joachim De Beule. Unify and merge in Fluid Construction Grammar. In P. Vogt, Y. Sugita, E. Tuci, and C. Nehaniv, editors, Symbol Grounding and Beyond., LNAI 4211, pages 197–223, Berlin, 2006. Springer. find
  40. Remi van Trijp. Feature matrices and agreement: A case study for German case. In Luc Steels, editor, Design Patterns in Fluid Construction Grammar. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2011. find
  41. M. Walshe. A Middle High German Reader: With Grammar, Notes and Glossary. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1974. find
  42. Bernd Wiese. Iconicity and syncretism. on pronominal inflection in Modern German. In Robin Sckmann, editor, Theoretical Linguistics and Grammatical Description, pages 323–344. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1996. find
  43. Joseph Wright. An Old High German Primer. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2nd edition, 1906. find
  44. Dieter Wunderlich. Der unterspezifizierte Artikel. In Karl Heinz Ramers Dürscheid and Monika Schwarz, editors, Sprache im Fokus, pages 47– 55. Niemeyer, Tübingen, 1997. find

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/trijp-2012-not-as-awful-as-it/