Meaning  Text Theory: Recent Developments

1. Meaning  Text Theory: Recent Developments Leonid L. Iomdin Computational Linguistics Laboratory, Institute for Information Transmission Problems, Russian Academy of Sciences

2. Abstract • The talk will cover important contributions to MTT by the Moscow Semantic School: • a new theory of lexical functions by Jury Apresjan, which shows in particular that even syntactically-driven lexical functions of the Oper-Func family have lexical meanings of their own and are therefore semantically motivated; • an extended theory of semantic valences by Igor Boguslavsky, which offers a broad generalization of the notion of valence and is used to explain complex semantic interactions of lexical units in natural language utterances; • 3) a theory of microsyntax by Leonid Iomdin, which provides a theoretical basis for a uniform description and treatment of syntactic idioms as well as a variety of minor type syntactic phenomena. MTT: recent developments

3. Plan • MTT in brief • Lexical Functions: the modern view • Theory of Valence: new approaches • Microsyntax: in Pursue of the Integrated Description of Language MTT: recent developments

4. 1. MTT in brief MTT: recent developments

5. Classical Version of MTT Object of modeling: the phenomenon of language command The overall view of language in MTT is extremely simple. The language is a means with the help of which its speakers perform two operations: 1) They communicate their ideas to other people, i.e. they code certain senses with texts that express them (text production, generation, synthesis); 2) They understand ideas of other people, i.e. they perform the reverse operation of extracting senses from the text perceived (text understanding, or analysis). MTT: recent developments

6. Classical Version of MTT MTT can be viewed as a logical device simulating these two operations in their simplest manifestations, associated exclusively with the knowledge of the language (the dictionary and the grammar). Even though wholly unrestricted communication without the knowledge of the external world, the dialogue partner, communication situation etc, consideration of these factors go far beyond linguistic models in the proper sense. MTT: recent developments

7. Classical Version of MTT Of these two operations, the active operation of text production is viewed as more important: the phenomenon of language acquisition manifests here in full. MTT: recent developments

8. Classical Version of MTT This phenomenon consists of three human abilities: • The ability of choosing appropriate language units that express the required meaning. It is ensured by the speaker’s knowledge of word senses. • The ability to correctly combine linguistic units that have the required meaning. • The ability to paraphrase one’s utterances retaining its content. MTT: recent developments

9. Classical Version of MTT One of the main theses of classical MTT is as follows: world languages dispose of several dozens of very abstract meaninfs like ‘high degree’, ‘beginning’, ‘causation’, ‘liquidation’ etc., called Lexical Functions. The choice of a concrete word W to express this meaning is fully determined by the lexical properties of its argument X, with which W combines. We say кромешная тьма‘black darkness’ andмертвая тишина‘dead silence’, but not *мертвая тьмаand*кромешная тишина. MTT: recent developments

10. Classical Version of MTT Hence, the choice of W for value of this LF of X is semantically unmotivated, i.e. idiomatic. MTT: recent developments

11. 2. Lexical Functions: the Modern View MTT: recent developments

12. Lexical Functions: Correction of the General Idea In the MTT, lexical functions of the OPER-LABOR-FUNCare considered to be semantically empty and phraseologically bound, so that the choice of a verb as a value of a given LF appears to be semantically unmotivated. There are certain reservations, however. Mel’čuk and Zholkovsky say that OPER’s, FUNC’s and LABOR’s are verbs that turn semantically empty in the context of the keyword. MTT: recent developments

13. Lexical Functions: Correction of the General Idea Apresjan assumes that any verb of the OPER-LABOR-FUNCfamily has its own lexical meaning (i.e. it can never be semantically empty), which is why its choice for the role of a given LF for an argument is semantically motivated, though not always free. The extent of semantic motivation is different from different LFs. MTT: recent developments

14. Lexical Functions: Correction of the General Idea In somewhat more precise terms, the choice of a specific word L1 as value of a function F1 whose argument is noun X is partially motivated by the general meaning of F1, the lexical meaning of L1 and the fact that X belongs to a specific class or subclass of the fundamental semantic classification of predicates. MTT: recent developments

15. Lexical Functions: Correction of the General Idea It is growing with transition from OPERs to LABORs and FUNCs, and within any of the classes it grows from smaller index numbers to bigger index numbers. For instance, OPER1 as a whole is semantically less meaningful and less motivated than OPER2: an obvious reason being than the number of words representing OPER1 is many times larger than that of OPER2. MTT: recent developments

16. Lexical Functions: Correction of the General Idea Apresjan further showed that all words that act as values of certain lexical functions for specific argument words are semantically meaningful and accordingly have their own lexical meanings. The effect of emptiness emerges due to the fact that the meaning of the LF like OPER1 and OPER2 is fully included into the meaning of the keyword. MTT: recent developments

17. Lexical Functions: Correction of the General Idea For example, if one considers words with the meaning of a speech act, the value of OPER1 for these words is likely to be давать‘give’ (in the metaphorical sense of transferring an immaterial object): давать зарок, инструкцию, интервью, клятву, команду, консультацию, обещание, объяснение, ответ, приказ, присягу, разрешение, разъяснение, распоряжение, рекомендацию, совет, согласие, указание ‘give a vow, instruction, interview, oath, command, promise, explanation, answer, order, permission, elucidation, advice, consent, directions’ etc. Why? MTT: recent developments

18. Lexical Functions: Correction of the General Idea As is known, no speech act is possible without the Speaker (A1), Information Content (A2) and the Addressee (А3). The semantic role of the Addressee eventually amounts to the role of the Recipient: an Addressee is the recipient of a communication. But the Recipient is the third actant (А3) of the verb даватьin the sense of physical transmission, as in Он дал мне книгу‘he gave me a book’. Accordingly, the choice of даватьfor OPER1 of speech acts is not accidental: the recipient of a physical action transforms legitimately into an Addressee of an information action when we move from the physical sense of the verb даватьto the lexical functional sense. MTT: recent developments

19. Lexical Functions: Correction of the General Idea OPER2 from action names like контроль ‘control’, that presuppose the domination of the second participant of the situation (patient) by the first one (Agent), is more often than note represented by the verb подвергаться: подвергатьсяагрессии, аресту, атаке, бойкоту, бомбардировке, влиянию, гонениям, давлению, допросу, изгнанию, критике, мучениям, наказанию, налету, обстрелу, оскорблению, осмеянию, остракизму, побоям, порке, преследованиям, пытке, травле, цензуре, штрафу.‘be subject to aggression, arrest, attack, boycott, shelling, persecution, pressure, interrogation, banishment, criticism, torture, punishment, raid, insult, beating, whipping, biting, censure, fine’. Why? MTT: recent developments

20. Lexical Functions: Correction of the General Idea The verb подвергатьсяhas a passive meaning and presupposed a participant of the situation who is affected by another participant who has power or authority. MTT: recent developments

21. Lexical Functions: Correction of the General Idea Accordingly, if you fix the arguments of an LF (e.g.OPER1, and one of its expressions (e.g. давать), than we can see that these arguments are words of a sufficiently uniform semantic class. This is accounted for by a general law of semantic agreement, which demands that the meanings of combining words had a common component of meaning. Then if we take a noun, it must semantically agree with the expressions of all LFs possible for it. MTT: recent developments

22. Lexical Functions: Correction of the General Idea In this way, the update theory of LFs acquires the main property of any theory – the predicting power.Knowing semantic classes and a universal set of LFs, we can form correct lexicographic expectations (in the form of probabilistic forecasts) even about partially non-free combinability of words. This upgrades the work of a lexicographer to a new level – from individual description of the material to a systemic one. MTT: recent developments

23. 3. Theory of Valence: new approaches MTT: recent developments

24. Theory of Valence: new approaches Arguments (=actants) of predicates have two important properties regarding the correspondence between the syntactic and semantic structure. The first property concerns syntactic positions the arguments occupy with respect to the predicate. The second property is related to the correspondence between their positions in the syntactic and semantic structures. MTT: recent developments

25. Theory of Valence: new approaches In the prototypical case, arguments are directly subordinated to their predicates and occupy positions of the subject and direct or indirect object. Valence slots filled in this way are called active. MTT: recent developments

26. Theory of Valence: new approaches In non-prototypical cases, arguments can syntactically subordinate their predicate (passive valence slots) and even have no immediate syntactic link with it (distant, or discontinuous valence slots). These types of valence slots are mostly characteristic of adjectives, adverbs and nouns. MTT: recent developments

27. Theory of Valence: new approaches A number of linguistic concepts are related, directly or indirectly, to the notion of actant. However, usually only prototypical – active – valency instantiation is taken into account. If one includes into consideration passive and discontinuous valency slot filling, the area of actant-related phenomena expands greatly. Some of these phenomena will be discussed below to show that the notions of diathesis and conversion require broader generalization. MTT: recent developments

28. Theory of Valence: new approaches We will approach this subject from the position of Moscow Semantic School (MSS). It intersects, to a certain extent, with the theory of Formal Semantics (FS). MTT: recent developments

29. Theory of Valence: new approaches The main similarity between MSS and FS lies in the recognition of the fact that the argument structure of the sentence plays the role of the “semantic glue” which combines the meanings of words together. FS took in this revolutionary idea in the beginning of the 70s from R. Montague (Partee 1966). MTT: recent developments

30. Theory of Valence: new approaches Starting with the 8th issue of “Machine translation and applied linguistics” (1964), which initiated the Meaning – Text approach in the Soviet Union, and subsequent publications on the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary, it was explicitly claimed that the semantic definition of many words contains valence slots for the arguments. In the semantic definition, these slots are represented by variables. To construct the semantic structure of the sentence, one has to identify the actants with the help of the Government Pattern ( Subcategorization Frame) and substitute them for the variables. MTT: recent developments

31. Theory of Valence: new approaches The differences between the MSS and FS approaches consist, mostly, in the aim, object and tools of semantic analysis. For MSS, the meaning definition of each linguistic unit is of primary importance and should be carried out in maximum detail (Apresjan 1999). This definition is formulated in a natural language: it may be simplified and standardized, but must be sufficient for capturing subtle semantic distinctions. Rules of meaning amalgamation are devised to closely interact with semantic definition of words. MTT: recent developments

32. Theory of Valence: new approaches FS does not make it its aim to semantically define all meaningful units of language. This task is relegated to the lexicon, while FS is more interested in the mechanisms of meaning amalgamation than in the meanings as such. For meaning representation, it uses a logical metalanguage which is less suitable for describing the spectrum of linguistically relevant meanings. On the other hand, this metalanguage is much more convenient for describing logical properties of natural languages than the semantic language of MSS. MTT: recent developments

33. Theory of Valence: new approaches However, one cannot describe the way lexical meanings are put together without disposing of the detailed semantic definition of each word. We proceed from the assumption that if word A semantically affects word B then B should contain a meaning component for A to act upon. MTT: recent developments

34. Theory of Valence: new approaches To give one example, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English defines accent as ‘the way someone pronounces the words of a language, showing which country or which part of a country they come from’. MTT: recent developments

35. Theory of Valence: new approaches So, southern accent is interpreted as the way somebody pronounces the words of a language, showing that the speaker is from the South. However, this definition does not explain the combinability of this word with intensifiers: strong <heavy, pronounced, slight> accent. It does not contain any quantifiable component that is affected by these adjectives. What do these adjectives intensify? When we say that somebody speaks English with a heavy <slight> Essex accent we mean that his pronunciation of English words (a) is typical for people from Essex and (b) is very <slightly> different from the standard. MTT: recent developments

36. Theory of Valence: new approaches This is a good reason for revising the definition of accent and including the component ‘different’ in this definition: X has a A accent (in B) = ‘the way X pronounces the words of language B is different from the way speakers of B usually pronounce them and typical for speakers of language, group or locality A’. MTT: recent developments

37. Theory of Valence: new approaches For MSS, the starting point is the semantic analysis of the situation denoted by the given word. Analytical semantic definition of this word is constructed according to certain requirements. In this respect, all types of words – verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, etc. – are on equal footing and obey the same principles of description. MTT: recent developments

38. Theory of Valence: new approaches For a word to have a certain valence it is necessary, though insufficient, that a situation denoted by this word should contain a corresponding participant in the intuitively obvious way. From this point of view, not nearly all generalized quantifiers are eligible for having a valence filled by a verbal phrase. Noun phrases twenty students and many of the students may both form a sentence when combined with a one-place verb phrase (e.g. were late for the exam) and therefore are generalized quantifiers. However, only in the second case (many of) are we prepared to postulate a semantic valence filled by a verbal phrase. MTT: recent developments

39. Theory of Valence: new approaches Let us assume that we have a good dictionary which contains definitions of all meaningful linguistic units. What else should we know in order to combine the meanings of these units so that to obtain the semantic structure of the sentence? The main mechanism of meaning amalgamation is instantiation of valence slots. A set of valence slots of a word is determined by its semantic definition. An obligatory participant of the situation denoted by the word opens a valence slot if this participant is expressed together with this word in a regular way (Mel’čuk 2004a,b). MTT: recent developments

40. Theory of Valence: new approaches It is often believed that valences are primarily needed for the description of government properties of words. It is this task that motivates the creation of numerous valence dictionaries. We put a different emphasis: valences are mainly needed for uniting meanings of words to form the semantic structure of the sentence. MTT: recent developments

41. Theory of Valence: new approaches Valence slot filling can be considered as semantic glue which connects meanings of words. We assume that if there is a syntagmatic semantic link between two words, then in most cases one of them fills a valence slot of the other, or, more precisely, the meaning of one of these words contains a predicate whose argument makes part of the meaning of the second one, as we saw in the accent example. MTT: recent developments

42. Theory of Valence: new approaches There are three types of valence slots: active, passive, and discontinuous ones (Boguslavsky 2003). • An active valency slot of predicate L is filled with sentence elements which are syntactically subordinated to L. • A passive valency slot is filled with elements that syntactically subordinate L. • The elements that fill a discontinous valence slot do not have any direct syntactic link with L. MTT: recent developments

43. Theory of Valence: new approaches Active valency slots are well fit for solving the problem of slot filling. First of all, this fact manifests itself in that each valence slot has its own set of surface realizations. If a word has several valency slots, their means of realization, as a rule, clearly contrast. Different semantic actants are marked by different means – cases, prepositions, conjunctions. However, this is not an absolute rule. Sometimes, different valency slots of the same predicate can be filled in the same way. The best known example are the genitive subjects and objects of nouns: amor patris, invitation of the president. Cf. also prepositionless first and second complements of the type Give Mary a book; Answer the question vs. answer nothing. MTT: recent developments

44. Theory of Valence: new approaches A rarer example is provided by Russian words достаточно‘sufficient’ and необходимо‘necessary’ that can fill both valence slots by means of the same conjunction чтобы‘in order to’. MTT: recent developments

45. Theory of Valence: new approaches A rarer example is provided by Russian words достаточно‘sufficient’ and необходимо‘necessary’ that can fill both valence slots by means of the same conjunction чтобы‘in order to’. MTT: recent developments

46. Theory of Valence: new approaches (2a)Чтобы Q, достаточно, чтобы P ‘for Q it is sufficient if P’ (2b)Чтобы всё взлетело на воздух, достаточно, чтобы кто-нибудь поднес спичку (lit. ‘that everything blows up sufficient that anyone strikes a match’) ‘it is sufficient to strike a match and everything will blow up’ MTT: recent developments

47. Theory of Valence: new approaches In this case, though, the identity of the conjunction is made up for with the word order distinction: (2c) * Чтобы кто-нибудь поднёс спичку, достаточно, чтобы всё взлетело на воздух lit. ‘that anyone strikes a match sufficient that everything blows up’ Curiously enough, in case of достаточно(but not необходимо‘necessary’) valencе slot P can be filled with the coordinating conjunction – a phenomenon known in English, too: cf. the translation of example (2b): (2d)Достаточно, чтобы кто-нибудь поднес спичку, и все взлетит на воздух ‘it is sufficient to strike a match and everything will blow up’ MTT: recent developments

48. Theory of Valence: new approaches For each class of predicates there exists a prototypical syntactic position of their actants and a number of non-prototypical positions. The prototypical position is the one occupied by the actant of a monovalent predicate. If a verb has only one valence slot, an actant that fills it will most probably be a subject (John sleeps). For nouns, the prototypical position is that of a genitive complement (as in начало концерта‘the beginning of the concert’). For predicates with passive valence slots, the prototypical position of the actant is that of the subordinating word: a noun, in case of adjectives (interesting book), and a verb, in case of adverbs (run fast). MTT: recent developments

49. Theory of Valence: new approaches If a predicate has more than one valency slot, other actants occupy other, less prototypical positions. Which are they? Leaving aside directly subordinated actants accounted for by the government pattern, there are three positions which a non-first actant may occupy: that of a subordinating verb, a dependent of the subordinating verb, and a dependent of the subordinating noun. MTT: recent developments

50. Theory of Valence: new approaches Subordinating Verb An important class of words which have a valency slot filled by a subordinating verb are quantifiers (all, every, each, some, many of, most, majority, minority, etc.). These words have at least two valence slots. One of them is filled by a noun phrase directly connected to the quantifier, and the other by a subordinating verbal phrase. For example, the words most and majority denote a certain part of a whole R that consists of elements having property P and is larger than the part of R that does not share this property. MTT: recent developments