Prof. Joseph Emonds

Lecture 
                                 VORTRAG
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Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)                   
                        Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
  Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
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Presenter:

Prof. Joseph Emonds
http://sils.shoin.ac.jp/~jeemonds/

"The Grammatical Lexicon: the fundamental tool for constructing
convergent numerations." 

Short summary:

Current versions of Chomskyan syntax take for granted that syntactic
derivations depend on prior specification of complete “numerations” 
of lexical items, which then combine according to the principles of
syntax. However, competence models have provided no ways to choose
such numerations; they are either chosen randomly or based on the
intuition of (ultimately native) speakers. In neither case is there
any scientific characterization of these objects, and so syntactic
derivations lose their status as a scientific model. This essay
claims that numerations in a plausible formal model of language
can be conceived as random (or, formally equivalently, pragmatically
determined) only if syntactic derivations can supplement them in a
highly constrained way: by adding to them items from a special lexical
subcomponent of purely grammatical or “closed class” items. Items from
this subcomponent, dubbed the Syntacticon in some recent work,
seem to have precisely the grammatical properties (insertion into
already processed structures, possibly null phonology) needed to make
the otherwise randomly selected numerations “converge” to well formed
Logical Forms.
In this talk, I will be relating the idea of a numeration of lexical
items to a corresponding syntactic derivation. An initial definition of
a convergent numeration (throughout, a “c-numeration”) is a set of all
and only the lexical items that appear in a well-formed syntactic
structure.

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   Zeit:   Mittwoch, 30. Jänner 2008, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

   Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
           fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
           Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.



   OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
   FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE



   Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


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