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Parsing with Situation Semantics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2008

Thomas Polzin  and
Hannes Rieser
Thomas Polzin
Affiliation:
Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies, University of BielefeldPO Box 8640, D-4800 Bielefeld, Germany
Hannes Rieser
Affiliation:
Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies, University of BielefeldPO Box 8640, D-4800 Bielefeld, Germany
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Abstract

This paper integrates several related lines of research in an implemented model. Its main aim is to show how principles of situation semantics concerning meanings, constraints and the preferred ontology can be represented and mapped onto expressions of natural language in a straightforward way. For assembling larger chunks of information a unification-based approach is used. The semantics is grafted upon a shift- reduce parser which does the main work in associating expressions with meanings. In order to capture the much debated difference between sentence and utterance meaning the whole machinery provides first an abstract meaning (conceived as a constraint) where the parameters are non-anchored. Subsequently, a model in the technical sense provides anchors for parameters and thus yields the utterance meaning of the sentence parsed. Finally, it is checked whether this semantic representation of the parsing result can be regarded as a genuine situation semantic object. This is done by showing that it confirms to the axioms of a situation theoretic model. As a result, parses are far more constrained and theory-guided than usual. The idea of parsing used goes back to work originally done by Barwise and Perry, the coding of semantic entities owes much to proposals issued by K. Devlin and D. Westerdåhl. The whole model is implemented in PROLOG

Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , December 1991 , pp. 141 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

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