|
|
 E-mail this message to a friend
|
|
Title:
|
A Computational Study ofTransitivity
|
|
Author:
|
Tanmoy Bhattacharya
|
|
Email:
|
click here to access email
|
|
Homepage:
|
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uclyara/home.htm
|
|
Degree Awarded:
|
University of Hyderabad
, Centre for Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies
|
|
Degree Date:
|
1995
|
|
Linguistic Subfield(s):
|
Discourse Analysis
Psycholinguistics
Syntax
|
|
Subject Language(s):
|
Bengali
Hindi
|
|
Director(s):
|
Probal Dasgupta
R. Amritavalli
Barbara Lust
|
|
|
Abstract:
|
|
The central issue that the dissertation addresses is: In what form is language available to the language user? One of the claims is that: clauses stage events (or actions) like a camera staging a film/ frame. The utterance/ understanding of a sentence is a spectacle. A major part of the thesis, therefore, is concerned with the prsentational aspect of a clause.
Transitivity is the clearest of the asymmetries which represents the cognitive/ perceptive notion of salience. Psycholinguistic evidence show that for a child, the basic conceptual structure is that 'persons perform actions and things are affected by actions'. In the thesis this is interpreted as transitivity. A syntactic account of transitivity is constructed where certain syntactic configurations and operations reflect extra-sentential notions like staging, scening, and event. In the introduction (chapter 1), I elaborate the interconnections that obtain between various asymmetries and the given/ new distinction. The syntactic impact that such interconnections may have on concepts like Staging, Scening and Event which together define the consequences of a clause in the totality of a discourse is further discussed.
In Chpter 2, DRT is extended to a camera angle view of discourse. Discourse, in this model, is to be seen in terms of photographs. Language understanding takes place through the camera lens. The notion of 'field' is proposed to be the theoretical construct to capture a camera angle view. Implementation of the theory demands a field to file mapping in terms of a salience gradient. Transitivity is further reduced to predication and agreement. Connections between the head and the tail of asymmetries are established through agreement. The notion of field, the thesis claims, will lead to a more efficient correspondence between the Kamp (1981) and the Heim (1982) versions of DRT.
In chapter 3 I discuss the notion of agreement as much as it bears upon transitivity. Agreement for this purpose serves the goal of identifying the participants for evaluating syntactic transitivity and therefore, ultimately, salience --- the major thrust of this study. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to the thesis that the object relation is more important; This is seen in the light of a more general term like landmark. In this chapter, unergative clauses are first shown to consistently contain a deep object position. The following sections discuss ergatives, transitives unaccusatives to argue that all of them have an object at some level of derivation. An analysis of the phenomenon of long distance agreement in Hindi is presented, based on Watanabe's (1993) Three Layered Case Theory and the claim is made that the analysis has an advantage over existing analyses in terms of the data that it covers as also the computational edge that it packages.
In chapter 4 the phenomenon of (Noun) Classification in Bangla (and Hindi, to some extent) is discussed in conjunction with our drive towards discovering newer asymmetries down the clause highway. The inner stories of strength resolution of B(adge) and D(eclension) are revealed in order to flesh out the relevant phrase picture as much as it contributes to the clause picture. Definiteness, in this connection, seems to correlate strongly with the new/given distinction.
The study also includes a discussion of Principle Based Parsing (PBP) in connection with the Bangla classifier system and show that a PBP approach along with a strong KB will give us the right results as far as the DPs in Bangla/Hindi are concerned. It is proposed that Frames are phrase level computational variants of the thematic concept of scening which is claimed to determine the modality aspects of a clause and thus the parsing technique that is suggested enables a computation of scenes. Lastly, a KB called WISE is proposed which solves certain residual problems of Bangla nominal syntax.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Page Updated: 28-Nov-2009
Please report any bad links or misclassified data
LINGUIST Homepage | Read
LINGUIST | Contact us
While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed
on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.
|
|
