Valerio Allegranza general and computational linguistics article

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Valerio Allegranza

Determination and Quantification

published in:

Frank van Eynde and Paul Schmidt, eds., Linguistic Specifications for Typed Feature Structure Formalisms. Vol. 10 of Studies in Machine Translation and Natural Language Processing, Official Publications of the European Communities, Luxembourg, 1998. (pp. 281-314)
Copyright © Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, European Commission.

Abstract:

This contribution to the official publication reporting on the results of a European project (Linguistic Specifications for Future Industrial Standards, cf. Curriculum Vitae) deals with linguistic phenomena of determination and quantification. The study starts from a broad descriptive characterization of morpho-syntactic determination, covering articles as well as cardinal, demonstrative, ordinal, possessive and quantitative determiners, and illustrates it by means of multilingual data; on the other hand, quantification is understood as a semantic mechanism, modelling Noun Phrase (NP) interpretation as assumed by standard approaches to logical semantics that the work briefly reviews. For the purposes of computational linguistics, a treatment of determiners, NP structure and quantification building on the above-mentioned background is developed within a version of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). In this connection the author makes a number of innovative proposals, namely:

a notion of 'functor' is introduced so as to generalize over head-specifier, head-adjunct and head-marker dependencies as they were treated in the original HPSG by Pollard and Sag (1994), while relevant distinctions are fully lexicalized;
the adjunct or specifier role of lexically underspecified determiners – e.g., cardinals – results from the syntactic context in which they occur, modulo a flexible version of X-bar Theory;
nominal heads are assigned a 'default' quantificational interpretation for determinerless NPs like the 'bare plurals', which is appropriately replaced (by virtue of a Revised Semantics Principle) when the same heads occur with some determiner.

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The original was delivered to the book editors in June 1997, but for reference or quotation please remember that it was published as specified by the Abstract's heading above. Note also that page numbering and layout in my file differ from the published article, although the text is the same.

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