Exploring Multidominance in Tree Adjoining Grammar

1. Exploring Multidominance in Tree Adjoining Grammar Joan Chen-Main joan@cogsci.jhu.edu Department of Cognitive Science Johns Hopkins University

2. In Two Places at Once • Some constructions seem like they have an element in two places at once: Joe bakes ___ and Sam eats cookies. What did Emmy eat ___?

3. Standard Treatment: Trees • Movement or ellipsis • Unique node immediately dominating each node

4. Alternative Treatment: Graphs Gärtner, Wilder, Abels, Goodall, and others • One element in one place • Mulitidominance

5. How are such graphs generated? What introduces multidominance into the system?

6. and Sarkar and Joshi (1996) • Some nodes are marked for contraction

7. and Sarkar and Joshi (1996) • Node contraction results in multidominance

8. VP VP BP B VP and Example: Conjoined VPs Elementary trees

9. Example: Conjoined VPs • VP coordination tree adjoined into eats tree • drinks tree substituted into coordination tree

10. Example: Conjoined VPs NP nodes contract

11. Example: Conjoined VPs Joe eats cookies and drinks tea.

12. Pushing the Proposal Instead of being restricted to coordination . . . Suppose node contraction is a general mechanism in the TAG system. Where else might we see multidominance?

13. Overview • What such a system can do • Coordination • “Movement” • Interleaving • Factoring out recursion • Appropriate Restrictions • Island Constraints • Part of Coordinate Structure Constraint • Current Concerns • Linearization, Gapping, other part of CSC

14. Multidomination in “Movement” PROPOSAL: Node contraction can replace elementary tree internal movement.

15. Example: Wh-Question Did-eat tree substitutes into wh-question tree

16. Example: Wh-Question DPs substitutes in to yield What did Emmy eat?

17. The Interleaving Problem DoesSamseemto like pizza?

18. Allowing Interleaving Elementary trees marked for node contraction

19. Allowing Interleaving The does seem tree adjoins into the to like tree

20. Allowing Interleaving The to like tree substitutes into the yes-no question tree

21. Final Structure

22. Small Trees and Recursion • Hegarty (1993): Smaller trees allow further “Factoring out” of recursive structure • V, I, and some C’s not distinguished by the combinatory operations

23. yields Small Trees and Node Contraction • Head Movement in Hegarty’s system requires “hiccup,” two V positions. • With node contraction, we can maintain parallel between Eng and French. • Schematic for V to I movement

24. Island Constraints • Certain syntactic configurations block movement. (Ross 1967) • embedded questions • wh-relative clauses • subject islands • complex NPs • Coordinate Structure Constraint • Part A: No conjunct can be a gap • Part B: No element of a conjunct can be a gap if its filler is outside the conjunct

25. A Graph To Ban

26. A Graph To Ban

27. Deriving Island Effects • Impose a restriction on node contraction: After substitution, every node marked for contraction must have been contracted. • No such restriction following adjoining • Imposes some locality on node contraction • Intuition: pieces of structure combined via substitution are somehow more distinct than pieces of structure combined via adjunction.

28. A B Tree A Tree A * C Tree B Tree B X Tree C Tree C X X Locality on Node Contraction Schematic Derivation Trees OK not OK

29. Example: Embedded Question Islands *Which party did Alice ask who you had invited to? • Elementary trees marked for contraction:

30. Example: Embedded Question Islands *Which party did Alice ask who you had invited to? • Problematic to combine these trees:

31. The Unavoidable Problem • In the best case scenario . . . • The to-tree adjoins into the had invited tree. • Following adjoining, nodes waiting to be contraction are allowed.

32. The Unavoidable Problem • Next, the had invited tree substitutes into the question tree. • Following substitution, no contraction nodes are allowed to be “leftover.” • no way for all the nodes marked for contraction to do so.

33. * Failed Derivation *Which party did Alice ask who you had invited to?

34. Additional Island Effects • This restriction blocks extraction from: • embedded questions • wh-relative clauses • subject islands • complex NPs

35. Coordinated DPs and the CSC Joe watched a movie about Stevie Wonder and a TV show about bridges.

36. Coordinated DPs and the CSC *Who did Joe watch a movie about ___ and a TV show about bridges? *

37. Coordinated DPs and the CSC What did Joe watch a movie about Stevie Wonder and ___? *

38. Conclusions Allowing general node contraction in TAG: • Provides a unified mechanism for coordination and movement (sans traces) • Allows derivation of constructions with interleaved elements • Allows further factoring out of recursion • Can be restricted to derive island effects

39. Current Concerns • Linearization How do we pronounce these graphs? • Gapping How do we generate two argument structures from one verb? • Coordinated TPs and the Coordinate Structure Constraint

40. XP1 XP1 BP B XP2 Linearization: elementary trees • Elementary trees are indeed trees (and not graphs!). • The primitive relations are immediate dominance and sister precedence. • Sister precedence is not sensitive to segment/category distinction. • E.g. the lower segment of XP1 sister precedes BP

41. Linearization: derived trees • Each elementary tree contributes immediate dominance and sister precedence information about the derived tree. • In the finished graph, • Dominance relation: the transitive closure of available dominance information • Precedence relation: derived from a modified non-tangling condition which uses notion of full dominance.

42. Linearization: derived trees • Full-dominance “non-tangling” condition: If α sister-precedes β, then everything α fully dominates precedes everything β fully dominates. • Full-dominance: α fully dominates γ iff every path from γ to the root of the sentence includes α. (Wilder 2001)

43. Simple Case: Shared Subject Joe eats cookies and ___ drinks tea. * ___ eats cookies and Joe drinks tea. SP’s affecting the contracted node: DPSSP V1`  Joe >> eats, cookies DPSSP V2`  Joe >> drinks, tea

44. Simple Case: Shared Subject Joe eats cookies and ___ drinks tea. * ___ eats cookies and Joe drinks tea. Other SP’s will order remaining items: VP1 SP BP  eats, cookies >> and, drinks, tea B SP VP2 and >> drinks, tea (VP2 ¬fully dominate Joe.) V1 SP DP1 eats >> cookies V2 SP DP2 drinks >> tea

45. Simple Case: Right Node Raising Joe bakes ____ and Sam decorates cookies. * Joe bakes cookies and Sam decorates ____. SP’s affecting the contracted node: V1 SP DPO bakes >> cookies V2 SP DPO decorates >> cookies Contrasts with Pronounce-in-Highest-Position strategy

46. Simple Case: Shared Subj & Obj Joe bakes ____ and ___ decorates cookies. * Joe bakes cookies and ___ decorates ___. * ___ bakes ___ and Joe decorates cookies. * ___ bakes cookies and Joe decorates ___.

47. Simple Case: Shared Subj & Obj SP’s affecting the contracted nodes: DPSSP V1' Joe >> bakes DPSSP V2' Joe >> decorates V1 SP DPObakes >> cookies V2 SP DPOdecorates >> cookies SP’s ordering remaining items: VP1 SP BP  bakes >> and B SP VP2 and >> decorates Contrasts with Wilder’s full-dominance LCA

48. Kayne’s (1994) LCA • If a syntactic structure cannot provide the information needed to linearize its terminals, the structure is ill-formed. • Two kinds of violation • Antisymmetry • Totality

49. Antisymmetry Violations What did Emmy ___ eat ___? Symmetrical Pair: DPOSP QC'  what >> eat, did, Emmy V SP DPO eat >> what

50. Avoiding Symmetry • Dominance provides a partial order on SP pairs • Give priority to information from the SP pair ordered earliest. • If a contradiction arises later, ignore it. • i.e. If you can’t preserve order, pronounce as high as you can.