LingLunch : A. An, A. Abeillé, R. Levy

Jeudi 30 Janvier 2020, 12:00 to 13:00
Organisation: 
Philip Miller et Ewan Dunbar
Lieu: 

LLF – Bât. ODG – 5e étage – Salle du conseil (533)

Aixiu An (LLF-MIT), Anne Abeillé (LLF) et Roger Levy (MIT)
French agreement: A sum-weighted grammar for gradient grammatical knowledge

The debate whether the grammatical knowledge built by the combinatorial language system is categorical or gradient is at the heart of linguistic theories.  In this work, we propose a sum weighted model (similar but different from OT, Harmonic Grammar) to capture the intermediate grammaticality reflected by acceptability judgments.

We present 7 acceptability experiments on French regarding the agreement with a conjoined NP in order to test different agreement strategies (Resolution, CCA, FCA) which have been reported in the literature (Grevisse and Goosse 2006). The working assumption is that the violation of each strategy will result in the penalization of the sentences' well-formedness, but its strength depends on various features (e.g. gender/number, attributive/predicative agreement). With a large set of acceptability judgement experiments data, our sum-weighted model yields out that the grammaticality is affected by some implicit linguistic regularities, which is also observed by the typological hierarchy (Corbett 1991).