Syntax 1 Wiki: Week 4: Difference between revisions

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=== Valence Properties of Verbs ===
All verbs in English need to have a subject. But verbs differ from each in other in whether they need to have complements, how many complements they need, and what kinds of complements they are. All the elements which a verb (or a word of another part of speech) can occur with are called its <span style="color: blue>arguments</span>. The sum of all the arguments are called the word's <span style="color: blue>valence</span>.
In feature structures, the arguments of the verb are described by three so-called <span style="color: blue>valence features</span>: SUBJ, SPR, and COMPS. We will explain SPR later and here concentrate on the other two. In school you learned that traditional grammar distinguishes between intransitive verbs like ''snore'' and transitive verbs like ''kiss''. These verbs can be used as follows:
Intransitive verb:
(1) Lilly snored.<br>
(2) *Lilly snored Fido.
Transitive verb:
(3) *Lilly kissed.<br>
(4) Lilly kissed Fido.
(1)-(2) show that an intransitive verb can (in fact, must) have a subject, but is not allowed to have a direct object. (3)-(4) show that, in contrast, transitive verbs must have both a subject and a direct object.
With the use of the valence features, we can capture the similarity and difference between intransitive and transitive verbs. All valence features take a list as value. To express that all verbs must have one and only one subject, we require their SUBJ list to be as follows:
SUBJ <NP>
The COMPS lists of intransitive and transitive verbs must look different, however:
Intransitive: COMPS < ><br>
Transitive: COMPS <NP>
When we put the subject and complement information together for both types of verbs, we get the following result:
Intransitive verbs:
SUBJ <NP> <br>
COMPS < >
Transitive verbs:
SUBJ <NP><br>
COMPS <NP >
Convince yourself that this is true by looking at these two verbs in the [http://141.2.159.95:7001/wt/ Online Grammar].
Now we are going to do an exercise together:
We will look at a number of verbs in the [http://141.2.159.95:7001/wt/ Online Grammar]. Their SUBJ lists will all have the same length but their COMPS lists may be of different lengths.
<span style="color: red>Exercise</span>
Find a systematic relationship between the semantic relation that the verb expresses and its valence (we continue to ignore the valence feature SPR for now). You find the semantic information as the value of the feature CONT.
To find the generalization, you might want to ask yourself the following questions:
* How many elements are on the SUBJ list?
* How many elements are on the COMPS list?
==== Homework for Week 5 ====
1. Work through the following sections of the Wiki:<br>
:  [[Grammatical_Functions|Grammatical Functions]]<br>
-->
== A Systematic Way of Representing Information ==
You have probably encountered the word ''database''. A database is a way of collecting data about objects (people, birds, planets, etc.) where the objects have similar properties (e.g. first name, last name, date of birth, etc.), but different values for these properties. Here are a few examples.
The page [https://qis.server.uni-frankfurt.de/qisserver/rds;jsessionid=5C3620A59C4CF824B88845E7DF634C45.waldmarie01?state=verpublish&status=init&vmfile=no&moduleCall=webInfo&publishConfFile=webInfoPerson&keep=y&publishSubDir=personal&personal.pid=10183 QIS-Webelhuth] lists some information about one of the professors of the University of Frankfurt. The page [https://qis.server.uni-frankfurt.de/qisserver/rds?moduleCall=webInfo&personal.pid=14417&publishConfFile=webInfoPerson&publishSubDir=personal&state=verpublish&status=init&topitem=members&vmfile=no QIS-Sailer] lists the corresponding information about a second professor. Let us, to simplify matters, extract some pieces of the information from both pages. Then we can represent the information as follows:
[[File:employees.jpg]]
We see a table of information enclosed by straight brackets. In the table there are two columns: the first column contains FEATURES of employees of the University of Frankfurt and the second one the ''values'' of those features for two employees, Prof. Webelhuth and Prof. Sailer. This description format is called a <span style="color: blue>feature structure</span> for obvious reasons: we describe objects in terms of the values they have for certain features.
Here is a second example. If you go to the online book catalog of Goethe University and type in the two names "Gert Webelhuth" and "Julika Griem", you will find a list of books authored by these two professors. If you click on a link describing one of these books, then the information about the book is also given to you in the form of a feature structure. Using the same format as above, you will find the following two descriptions:
[[File:books.jpg]]
Here is a third and last example. The following description of mobile phones can be found on the internet:
<br>
<br>
[[File:iphones.png]]
<br>
<br>
Do you realize that the information above is in the form of a table? In the first column, we find FEATURES of phones and in each following column we find the values for the features of one individual model of phone. It would be easy to represent this information in the form of feature structures.
== Types ==
Look at the feature structures for employees, books, and mobile phones one more time. Since they describe different things, they also contain different FEATURES. The employees have an OFFICE, but the books and the mobile phones do not. The books have an AUTHOR and a PUBLISHER, but employees and mobile phones do not. In contrast, only the phones have the features BATTERY LIFE and CAMERA SIZE. The moral of the story is that <span style="color: blue>the inventory of FEATURES in a feature structure depends on the object that the feature structure is meant to describe.</span> This information somehow needs to be represented in the feature structure as well. To this end, we add a so-called ''type'' to feature structures in the top lefthand corner which signals <span style="color: blue>the type of the feature structure</span>, i.e. what the feature structure is about.
The first employee feature structure and the first book feature structure above will then really look as follows:
[[File:employee-Sailer.jpg]]
[[File:book-Webelhuth.jpg]]
In general, feature structures will then have the following form:
[[File:generic-fs.jpg]]




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