[developers] Realizational v. incremental morphology

[Emily M. Bender]

Dear Berthold,

I hope you'll find time to respond in this conversation! I've also
added Olivier to the cc -- Olivier, please see below for context; I hope
you'll have time to reply, too.

Thanks,
Emily

On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 12:16 PM, David Inman <davinman at uw.edu> wrote:

> My objection to this during Emily's meeting I think remains: what is the
> actual difference between these views? It seems like a difference of
> perspective more than a difference in theoretical predictions, with
> incremental a generative perspective and relational a set-like perspective.
> It all seems a bit like wondering whether a set is accurately defined
> through induction or intersection - it doesn't matter, both describe the
> same thing, use whatever is most convenient. Unless I am missing something
> - and I consider this very likely -  are there actual theoretically
> different claims made between the two?
>
>
> _____________________________
> From: Guy Emerson <gete2 at cam.ac.uk>
> Sent: Saturday, October 31, 2015 1:52 AM
> Subject: Re: [developers] Realizational v. incremental morphology
> To: Emily M. Bender <ebender at uw.edu>
> Cc: Berthold Crysmann <berthold.crysmann at gmail.com>, developers <
> developers at delph-in.net>
>
>
>
> 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
>>
>
>
>
>


-- 
Emily M. Bender
Professor, Department of Linguistics
Check out CLMS on facebook! http://www.facebook.com/uwclma
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