[erg] _certain_q_rel

[Dan Flickinger]

I do see the need for an additional analysis of "certain cats" beyond what the trunk ERG provides.  Your guess looks like a good one, to model the new entry on the one for "enough".  But the MRS for "enough cats" comes out looking fine, with no strangeness in the relation for _enough_q_rel, so it is hard to see what would lead to the mangled semantics you reported for the "certain" example.

Anyway, I'll add the missing entry for "certain" to the trunk ERG, and then maybe you can compare it to the one you have proactively added.

 Dan

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Haley" <paul at haleyai.com>
To: "Emily M. Bender" <ebender at uw.edu>
Cc: "erg" <erg at delph-in.net>
Sent: Monday, April 13, 2015 2:20:56 PM
Subject: Re: [erg] _certain_q_rel

Dan, you are correct.  Someone here added it, probably because of 
something like this:



Is certain different than than other quantifiers of the d_-_prt-pl.*_le 
variety?

  * a_great_many_det := d_-_prt-pl_le & [ ORTH < "a", "great", "many" >,
    SYNSEM [ LKEYS.ALTKEYREL.PRED "_a+great+many_q_rel", PHON.ONSET voc ] ].
  * enough_det := d_-_prt-plm_le & [ ORTH < "enough" >, SYNSEM [
    LKEYS.KEYREL.PRED _enough_q_rel, PHON.ONSET voc ] ].

Thanks,
Paul

On 4/13/2015 4:53 PM, Paul Haley wrote:
> Good idea, Emily.  After trying to isolate why we couldn't get the 
> on-line demo to demonstrate the same behavior, it appears than an edit 
> to the name of a relation defined in fundamentals.tdl was responsible, 
> although we can't figure out exactly how!
>
> It turned out that working through our changes vs. the ERG as is, we 
> found one point at which post-loading of QC.tdl generated some 
> warnings about missing predicates.  Searching that file we cannot find 
> any reference to those predicates, but it is machine-generated in some 
> way.  Could this have led to unifications working (or not) that should 
> (not) have?
>
> Just wondering, but thanks for the prod.
>
> Paul
>
> On 4/9/2015 9:56 PM, Emily M. Bender wrote:
>> Hi Paul,
>>
>> This might be easier to answer if you could send a complete MRS (perhaps
>> for a shorter example with the same property)...
>>
>> Emily
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 6:24 PM, Paul Haley <paul at haleyai.com 
>> <mailto:paul at haleyai.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     Hi Folks,
>>
>>     I'm getting the subject relation with non-hole arguments:
>>
>>       * {ARG0=e61[declarative, indicative, ¬perfective, ¬progressive,
>>         untensed]}, {ARG1=x55[individuated, plural, third]}]
>>
>>     for a parse of the sentence:
>>
>>       * Some organisms survive and others die as the environment
>>         changes; this changes the percent of organisms with certain
>>         traits in that population.
>>
>>     Here's the syntactic result of that parse, fyi:
>>
>>       * 'some'('organisms')('survive')('and'('others'('die'('as'('the'('environment'('changes')))))))('this'('changes'('the'('percent'('of'('organisms'))))('with'('certain'('traits'('in'('that'('population'))))))))
>>
>>     The specific lexical entry involved is:
>>
>>       * certain_det := d_-_prt-pl_le & [ ORTH < "certain" >, SYNSEM [
>>         LKEYS.ALTKEYREL.PRED _certain_q_rel, PHON.ONSET con ] ].
>>
>>     And the relation is defined as follows:
>>
>>       * _certain_q_rel := explicit_quant_agr_q_rel.
>>
>>     but I'm stumped on how it's landing up with ARGs instead of
>>     normal quantification arguments.
>>
>>     Does anyone have any thoughts on whether this is proper?
>>
>>     Thank you,
>>     Paul
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Emily M. Bender
>> Professor, Department of Linguistics
>> Check out CLMS on facebook! http://www.facebook.com/uwclma
>