Abstract
We present a formalization of the constructivist analysis of argument structure in Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG). According to the constructivist analysis, often couched in terms of Distributed Morphology (DM), arguments are introduced in the syntax rather than specified by the lexical argument structure of the verb. We argue that formalizing constructivism in CCG not only provides the basis for a model of incremental processing of argument structure but also a principled account for the locality constraints on contextual allomorphy observed in the DM literature.
We would like to thank the audience of Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics 19 (LENLS19) and the anonymous reviewers of the abstract and the post-proceedings for insightful comments. We also thank Carlee Iritani for proofreading the manuscript. Any remaining errors are our own.
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Notes
- 1.
In (2), features irrelevant for the current discussion are omitted. T is a variable ranging over categories.
- 2.
There is a debate within constructivism over whether the internal argument should be severed from the root. We assume that it should, given that the root can appear without an internal argument (e.g., in deverbal nouns), following [7, 24]. See [17, 18] for arguments against separation of the internal argument from a root.
- 3.
We assume that the inflectional consonant is type-raised as
in the lexicon rather than having a simple category \(Ic_b\) and then being type-raised in the derivation. This follows the suggestion of one of the reviewers, who pointed out that the elimination of type-raising rules from the grammar has desirable consequences concerning parsing and long-distance dependencies. - 4.
Oleg Kiselyov (p.c.) pointed out that the current analysis does not provide a phonological explanation for why b and m corresponds to n, k and g to i, etc., in the euphonic change. Indeed, there are phonological reasons for the historic sound changes that are responsible for those correspondences. However, we remain agnostic about whether such an explanation is needed in the model of the synchronic I-language of a speaker of modern Japanese.
- 5.
[30] argues that there are two flavors for the active Voice head that appears in Japanese transitive verbs, which introduce a Causer and Agent respectively. We put aside this point for now and focus on the transitive-intransitive contrast. We note however that this analysis can be easily implemented in the current framework by assuming distinct semantics for each flavor.
- 6.
Apparent counterexamples to this pattern include ita-m-e-ru/ita-m-u ‘ache’ and kurusi-m-e-ru/kurusi-m-u ‘suffer.’ The intransitive forms of these verbs do not have -ar-, unlike the verbs mentioned in the main text. These counterexamples are probably only apparent. While the -ar- verbs illustrate a change of state of the subject, ita-m-u is stative, and kurusi-m-u takes an Experiencer as the subject. Arguably, therefore, these verbs differ in the argument structure and include a third Voice head other than what we call non-active here (cf. [3, 13]). Then the difference in the forms is expected. A reviewer pointed out yuru-m-e-ru/yuru-m-u ‘loosen’ as another counterexample; it actually forms a triplet with another intransitive form yuru-m-ar-u. A similar explanation may also apply to this case, although the semantic difference between the two intransitive forms is not very clear and seems to be subject to individual variation among native speakers.
- 7.
We thank Yusuke Kubota (p.c.) for suggesting [19] as relevant to the current discussion. Another work that deals with morphology with Categorial Grammar is [31], also suggested to us by Yusuke Kubota. The central idea of the work is that morphological operations are functions, and such functions can take another function as their argument. Although many interesting cases discussed there are out of the scope of the current study since they involve suprasegmentals, we believe the approach pursued here — viewing morphemes as functions that take other morphemes, which can be functions themselves — is in line with [31]’s intuition.
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Isono, S., Hasegawa, T., Kajikawa, K., Kono, K., Nakamura, S., Oseki, Y. (2023). Formalizing Argument Structures with Combinatory Categorial Grammar. In: Bekki, D., Mineshima, K., McCready, E. (eds) Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics. LENLS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14213. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43977-3_6
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