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Documentation for the Grammar Matrix Customization Sentential Negation Library

Introduction

This document explains how to fill out the Sentential Negation page of the Grammar Matrix Customization questionnaire and presents background information on the sentential negation library of the Grammar Matrix Customization System (Bender et al., 2002; Bender and Flickinger, 2005; Bender et al., 2010). General instructions on using the questionnaire can be found here.

Citing the Sentential Negation Library

The standard reference for the Sentential Negation Library and its implementations is Crowgey 2012. The full reference and .bib entry can be found here.

Options

The Sentential Negation page allows you to specify a range of values for the negation strategies that your language employs by choosing from pre-defined options provided to you on the page. Please note that the work on the Sentential Negation page in Matrix Customization questionnaire is still in progress. For example, some menu options under bipartite negation are only present as previews of future implementations and as of now provide no functionality. For more information about bipartite and other negation strategies under development please refer to the Upcoming Work section.

Please note that this part of the questionnaire is for describing sentential negation, and not constituent negation. Examples of these two different types of negation, referring to which part of the sentence is being negated, i.e. the entire sentence in sentential negation or only a constituent in constituent negation are below:

  • Sentential negation: John did not read the book.

  • Constituent negation: John asked Mary not to enter the house.

The Sentential Negation page in Matrix Customization questionnaire is divided into three sections, allowing you to specify the number of morphemes required for sentential negation in your language in the first section, describe the negation morphemes in more detail, and model asymmetric negation if applicable to your language. Please note that the section describing negation morphemes in detail is defined by the negation strategy you selected in the first section and appears only after you made that selection.

Number of morphemes

The coverage of sentential negation in Grammar Matrix is based on the assumption that the sentential negation usually requires presence of overt negation morphemes. The pre-defined options describing the number of overt morphemes required for sentential negation that Grammar Matrix customization system provides to you are:

  • zero

  • simple

  • bipartite

  • tripartite

  • more?!

These five negation strategies are described in more detail below:

Negation without an overt marker ("zero" negation)

  • If you are modeling a language that does not use an overt marker for negation, e.g. Dravidian language Historical Kannada, which marks sentential negation by absence of a tense marker (otherwise present in the affirmative constructions), please select the first option "zero".

Simple negation

  • If you are modeling a language that uses a single overt marker for negation, please select the second option "simple." If you select this option, you will be provided with the menu allowing you to describe this negation morpheme in more detail. You will be presented with four options indicating the grammatical means through which it can be expressed:

    • Inflection

    • Negative auxiliary verb

    • Independent adverb

    • Selected adverb

    The pre-defined options above allow to model the single negation marker in your language through inflection of the verb (auxiliary, main, or finite verb), a separate negative auxiliary verb, or an adverb (independent adverb or selected adverb). An independent adverb is an adverb that modifies a V, a VP, or S. If you choose this option, you can also select the part of the sentence, to which the adverb attaches, as well as on which side of this word/phrase it attaches. A selected adverb is an adverb that is a complement selected by a verb (auxiliary, main, or finite verb).

Bipartite negation

  • If you are modeling a language that uses two overt markers for negation, please select the second option "bipartite." As mentioned earlier, the bipartite negation option is still being actively developed, so it is possible that you will encounter some difficulties in this section. If you select bipartite negation, you will be provided with several options on how to model sentential negation using two overt markers in your language, particularly the morphosyntax of these morphemes and their interactions. NEG1 is for the morpheme that is the main contributor of negation semantics to the sentence, while the NEG2 is for the second morpheme that works as a resumptive or specifying marker. Next, you can specify for each of these morphemes, NEG1 and NEG2, whether they are bound, or they are free and are the syntactic head, or they are free and are the syntactic complement, or, finally, they are free and are the syntactic modifier. Depending on the selections you make in this section, different options will appear and you will be instructed how to proceed in each case.

Tripartite negation

  • If you are modeling a language that uses three overt markers for negation, please select the third option "tripartite." An example of such language is a Lewo language of Vanuatu. This section is also under construction. For more information please refer to the Upcoming Work section.

Negation with more than 3 overt markers

  • Finally, if you encounter a language that uses more than three overt markers for negation, please let us know by e-mailing to matrix-dev mailing list (matrix-dev -at- uw.edu). Grammar Matrix Customization system currently does not provide coverage for the languages that use three overt negation markers, but we would be interested to know if such languages exist.

Asymmetric Negation

If there are certain conditions under which negation is allowed/disallowed in your language, you can model it in the Asymmetric Negation section on the Sentential Negation questionnaire page. You will need to click on the arrow in the option provided to you by Matrix Customization system questionnaire:

  • ► asymmetric_negation_options

There are two ways that you can model asymmetric negation in your language:

  • 1). Enable a [NEGATED luk] feature on syntactic HEAD. You will need to specify its value as [NEGATED +] on the verbs that allow negation and [NEGATED -] on the verbs or constructions that disallow negation. This option is provided to you on the bottom of the Asymmetric Negation section on the Sentential Negation questionnaire page:

    • Enable a HEAD feature ([NEGATED luk]) which is appropriate for heads of type verb.

    2). You can also model negation through agreement. For more information and examples on modeling asymmetric negation through agreement, please click on asymetric_negation_help arrow provided to you on the Sentential Negation page of the Grammar Matrix Customization questionnaire:

    • ► asymmetric_negation_help

After you select a negation strategy as applicable to your language on the Sentential Negation page, you will be able to specify values for negation (plus or minus) and what part of speech it is specified on in the verb types and auxiliary verb types on the Lexicon page and in the lexical rule types on Morphology page. Please refer to the Analyses section below for more information about choices you make on the Sentential Negation page and how they affect the semantics of lexical items.

Motivation

Sentential negation is a complicated phenomenon in terms of the variety of negation strategies employed by world languages. The number of negation markers, their positions within the sentence, their morphosyntactic roles vary tremendously from language to language. The Negation library of the Grammar Matrix Customization system was developed and continues to be extended to provide a broader coverage of negation across various languages.

Analyses

To cover various negation strategies employed by languages, eight lexical rules were implemented in Grammar Matrix: basic-infl-neg, val-and-cont-change-infl-neg-rule, form-change-neg-rule, comps-change-neg-rule, neg-sat-trigger-rule, val-change-neg-rule-1, val-change-neg-lex-rule-2, val-change-neg-sat-trigger-rule. Additionally, two auxiliaries for constructions head-comp-neg and head-mod-neg were added to the auxiliaries already existing in Grammar Matrix, as well as several free lexical items to implement complements and modifiers. You can find a detailed description of each rule and lexical items created to support negation in Grammar Matrix in the section 5.2.1 in Crowgey 2012.

The negation strategies you choose on the Sentential Negation page are stored in the choices file. Below is a snippet of code related to Negation from choices file for a language that uses one overt morpheme for negation, which is expressed through inflection and with a HEAD feature [NEGATED luk] enabled in the Asymmetric Negation section:

section=sentential-negation
neg-exp=1
neg-head-feature=on
infl-neg=on
adv-neg=on
neg-mod=vp
neg-order=before
neg-adv-orth=adverb_modifier

When you define negation values on the Sentential Negation customization page, your starter grammar unlocks the features [negation plus] and [negation minus] available for your use on the Lexicon and on the Morphology pages.

Feature [negation plus] allows you to add negative semantics to the lexical rule types as applicable to your language. Feature [negation minus] allows you to specify lexical items that are incompatible with negation, i.e. disallow negation. For example, if you choose a 'simple', 'negation by inflection' strategy on the Sentential Negation page, specifying [negation plus] on bound inflection on the Morphology page adds negative semantics to that lexical rule type.

Please refer to Chapter 4 in Crowgey 2012 for more information on Analyses.

Upcoming Work

Although the Sentential Negation library already covers various negation strategies, it could be extended further in order to provide a more throughout coverage of negation across languages.

For example, in addition to the extension of the bipartite negation coverage that is still under development, providing support for languages that use zero or three overt negation markers would be one of the possible improvements to the negation section in Grammar Matrix Customization system. Although these languages are quite rare compared to the languages with one or two overt negation markers, implementing zero and tripartite negation strategies would signify a more complete coverage of negation.

Other improvements to the currently existing negation section include providing support for multiple negation constructions and EDGE inflection, i.e. inflection that occurs at the edge of the phrase, which are not yet covered by Matrix Customization system.

For more information about future work on negation section of the Grammar Matrix Customization system please refer to Chapter 7 in Crowgey 2012.

References

Crowgey, Joshua. 2012. The Syntactic Exponence of Sentential Negation: a model for the LinGO Grammar Matrix. Masters thesis, University of Washington.

  • bibtex:

    @mastersthesis{Crowgey:12,
    author = {Joshua Crowgey},
    year = {2012},
    title = {The Syntactic Exponence of Sentential Negation: a model for the LinGO Grammar Matrix},
    school = {University of Washington}
    }

Givón, Talmy. 1984. Syntax: a typological-functional introduction [vol. III]. John Benjamins. Amsterdam, Philidelphia.

  • bibtex:

    @book{Givón:1984,
    author = {Talmy Givón},
    year = {1984},
    volume = {III},
    title = {Syntax: a typological-functional introduction},
    publisher = {John Benjamins. Amsterdam, Philidelphia}
    }

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