Abstract
Within the currently dominant Minimalist framework for syntax (Chomsky, 1995, 2000), it is not uncommon to encounter multiple proposals for the same natural language pattern in the literature. We investigate the possibility of evaluating and comparing analyses of syntax phenomena, implemented as minimalist grammars (Stabler, 1997), from a quantitative point of view. This paper introduces a principled way of making linguistic generalizations by detecting and eliminating syntactic and phonological redundancies in the data. As proof of concept, we first provide a small step-by-step example transforming a naive grammar over unsegmented words into a linguistically motivated grammar over morphemes, and then discuss a description of the English auxiliary system, passives, and raising verbs produced by a prototype implementation of a procedure for automated grammar optimization.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.conll-1.34
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Arianna Bisazza, Omri Abend
- Venue:
- CoNLL
- SIG:
- SIGNLL
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 435–444
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.conll-1.34
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.conll-1.34
- Cite (ACL):
- Marina Ermolaeva. 2021. Deconstructing syntactic generalizations with minimalist grammars. In Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pages 435–444, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Deconstructing syntactic generalizations with minimalist grammars (Ermolaeva, CoNLL 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2021.conll-1.34.pdf