Next: Case Assigners
Up: Case Assignment
Previous: Minimalism and Case
The English XTAG grammar adopts the notion of case and the case filter for many
of the same reasons argued in the GB literature. However, in some respects the
English XTAG grammar's implementation of case more closely resembles the
treatment in Chomsky's Minimalism framework [#!chomsky92!#] than the system
outlined in the GB literature [#!chomsky86!#]. As in Minimalism, nouns in
the XTAG grammar carry case with them, which is eventually `checked'. However
in the XTAG grammar, noun cases are checked against the case values assigned
by the verb during the unification of the feature structures. Unlike Chomsky's
Minimalism, there are no separate AGR nodes; the case checking comes from the
verbs directly. Case assignment from the verb is more like the GB approach than
the requirement of a SPEC-head relationship in Minimalism.
Most nouns in English do not have separate forms for nominative and accusative
case, and so they are ambiguous between the two. Pronouns, of course, are
morphologically marked for case, and each carries the appropriate case in its
feature. Figures 4.3(a) and 4.3(b) show
the NP tree anchored by a noun and a pronoun, respectively, along with the
feature values associated with each word. Note that books simply gets
the default case nom/acc, while she restricts the case to be nom.
|
0.5in |
|
(a) |
0.5in |
(b) |
- {Lexicalized NP trees with case markings
Next: Case Assigners
Up: Case Assignment
Previous: Minimalism and Case
XTAG Project
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~xtag