<div dir="ltr">Dear developers,<br><div><br></div><div>We'd like to seek your help for this problem of dealing with diff-lists.<br></div><div><br>Chinese interrogatives have in-situ wh-questions, which have wh-words appearing at positions of arguments, specifiers, and modifiers. While implementing the analysis for these interrogatives, we <br><br>1. Define all wh-words to have its QUE containing an index (<! #index !>), and all other words to have QUE as 0-dlist. <br><br>2. Redefine SYNSEM.NON-LOCAL.QUE to be a diff-list instead of 0-1-dlist (to allow more than one wh-word to appear in a question), and make binary rules to append QUE values of their daughters, as shown below:<br><br>basic-binary-phrase :+<br> [ SYNSEM.NON-LOCAL.QUE [ LIST #first,<br> LAST #last ],<br> ARGS < sign & [ SYNSEM.NON-LOCAL.QUE [ LIST #first,<br> LAST #middle ] ],<br> sign & [ SYNSEM.NON-LOCAL.QUE [ LIST #middle,<br> LAST #last ] ] > ]. <br><br>3. Define the rule to identify clauses with at least one wh-word and set SF to "ques". The problem is how to define the constraint for a diff-list with at least one item inside. <br>We tried to use "QUE.LIST 1-plus-list", which works great to exclude sentences with 0 wh-word, and to parse sentences with 2 or more wh-words. For sentences with exactly 1 wh-word, some can be parsed and some can not. It turns out that it works correctly if the wh-word is the first ARG in the binary rule, and it won't parse if the wh-word is the second ARG in the binary rule.<br>So it seems that appending gives us different results for the two scenarios:<br>a) when wh-word is the 1st ARG, mother's QUE can unify with the constraint.<br>-- 1st ARG's QUE: diff-list <br> [ LIST < 6 > + 16LIST,<br> LAST 16 ]<br>-- 2nd ARG's QUE: diff-list <br> [ LIST 19 0-1-list,<br> LAST 19 ]<br>-- mother's QUE: diff-list<br> [ LIST <4> + 18 0-1-list,<br> LAST 18 ]<br>b) when wh-word is the 2nd ARG, mother's QUE can't unify with the constraint, complaining the conflict between 1-list and 1-plus-list.<br>-- 1st ARG's QUE: diff-list <br> [ LIST 28 0-1-list,<br> LAST 28 ]<br>-- 2nd ARG's QUE: diff-list <br> [ LIST < 6 > + 16LIST,<br> LAST 16 ]<br>-- mother's QUE: diff-list<br> [ LIST 1-list <4> + 11,<br> LAST 11 ]<br><br>How can this be resolved so that we get consistent results regardless of the position of wh-word in a binary rule?<br><br></div><div>We also notice that two daughters with QUE as 0-dlist lead to the mother's QUE as diff-list (not 0-dlist) with identical LIST and LAST.<br></div><div><br>We have also tried defining 1-list to inherit from 1-plus-list too. Then the above problems will disappear, but it will fail to exclude sentences containing no wh-word.<br><br></div><div>Many thanks!<br></div><div>Zhenzhen<br></div></div>