[developers] Realizational v. incremental morphology

[Guy Emerson]

Here are Stump (2001)'s definitions:

"According to INCREMENTAL theories, inflectional morphology is
information-increasing; that is, words acquire morphosyntactic properties
only as a concomitant of acquiring the inflectional exponents of those
properties. On this view, `likes' acquires the properties ‘3sg subject
agreement’, ‘present tense’, and ‘indicative mood’ only through the
addition of `-s' (whether this is inserted from the lexicon or is
introduced by rule). According to REALIZATIONAL theories, by contrast, a
word’s association with a particular set of morphosyntactic properties
licenses the introduction of those properties’ inflectional exponents; on
this view, the association of the root `like' with the properties ‘3sg
subject agreement’, ‘present tense’, and ‘indicative mood’ licenses the
attachment of the suffix `-s' (whether this attachment is effected by
lexical insertion or by the application of a morphological rule)."

2015-10-30 19:55 GMT+00:00 Emily M. Bender <ebender at uw.edu>:

> Dear Berthold & developers by cc,
>
> My students I and were discussing Bonami & Crysmann 2013 (HPSG
> proceedings) in our group meeting this week, and that led me to a question
> about the relationship between the characterization of morphological
> theories (due I think to Stump 2001) and what we do in the implementation.
> That characterization contrasts "inferential" and "lexical" approaches
> (where the former relates inflected forms to stems via rules and the
>  latter has morphemes in the lexicon as separate entries) and
> "realizational" and "incremental" approaches.
>
> I don't fully have a handle on what the "realizational"/"incremental", and
> I don't have Stump's to hand, but here's how Ida Toivonen summarized the
> definitions in her review of Stump's book on LINGUIST List:
>
> "In incremental theories, morphosyntactic information gets added
> incrementally as morphemes are added to a stem. In a realizational
> theory, a word's association with certain morphosyntactic properties
> licenses the appropriate affixes."
> https://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-622.html
>
> On one way of reading this, it seems to me that the
> inferential/realizational dichotomy is itself opposed to the notion of
> order- and process- independence of constraints which I think is central to
> HPSG.  That is, it looks like an "incremental" theory is taking an
> analysis/parsing point of view (morphemes are given; their morphosyntactic
> effect is calculated) and a "realizational" theory is taking a
> realization/generation point of view (morphosyntactic features are given;
> the morphemes that realize them are licensed/generated).
>
> Joshua Crowgey pointed out that perhaps the distinction has to do with
> whether the attachment of morphemes (or application of morphological rules)
> is treated as something that can have an internal order or not, analogous
> to how our phrase structure rules can be ordered via constraints on the
> rules themselves (e.g. head-subj or head-spr refuse a daughter with a
> non-empty COMPS list, in effect enforcing head-comps to apply
> lower/'earlier' in the tree).
>
> Having laid out (and perhaps spread) my confusion, a few questions:
>
> 1. How do you see the incremental/realizational distinction relating to
> our implementation (within DELPH-IN) of constraint-based grammar?
> 2. Have you done any implementation based on the theory you lay out in
> Bonami & Crysmann 2013?
> 3. How do you associate the presence of something like [ MUD {neg} ] (or
> analogously for applicatives, say) with the morphosyntactic and
> morphosemantic consequences?
> 4. How do you implement a check on whether a form is fully inflected?
> 5. How do you implement grammaticality that is dependent on comparison
> across forms (per Panini's Principle)
>
> Thanks,
> Emily
>
> --
> Emily M. Bender
> Professor, Department of Linguistics
> Check out CLMS on facebook! http://www.facebook.com/uwclma
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.delph-in.net/archives/developers/attachments/20151031/58519972/attachment.html>