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Verb classes and event classes: From grammar to processing

Verb classes and event classes: From grammar to processing. Jean-Pierre Koenig University at Buffalo. Collaborators. Breton Bienvenue Gail Mauner Karin Michelson Shaakti Poornima Doug Roland Hong-Oak Yun. Verb classes vs. Event classes I. Lots of way of classifying event-types,

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Verb classes and event classes: From grammar to processing

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  1. Verb classes and event classes: From grammar to processing Jean-Pierre Koenig University at Buffalo

  2. Collaborators • Breton Bienvenue • Gail Mauner • Karin Michelson • Shaakti Poornima • Doug Roland • Hong-Oak Yun

  3. Verb classes vs. Event classes I • Lots of way of classifying event-types, • Some of them are well-established in memory; • Some less, cf. Barsalou’s (1983) ad hoc categories : • Ways to escape being killed by the Mafia; • Linguists focused on event classes that matter for morphosyntax = verb classes: • If rule of grammar targets a class of verbs, then this class is real (verb class);

  4. Outline • Two examples of “true” verb classes that reference relatively rare semantic properties; • Two examples of the use of semantically coherent classes of verbs to answer foundational semantic questions about what’s in a verb meaning • Verb classes and classes of verbs associated with an event class differ in ontological/epistemological status

  5. Outline • Two examples of “true” verb classes that reference relatively rare semantic properties; What are the boundaries of the semantic properties relevant to morphosyntactic processes?

  6. Iroquoian kin “verbs” • Most stems denoting kin relations in Iroquoian are partly verbal and partly nominal (Koenig and Michelson, In Press); • All verbal stems realize both arguments of kin terms; (1)waʔ-shako-hnutla-neʔ FACTUAL.MODE-3MASC.SG>3-catch.up.to-PUNCTUAL.ASPECT ‘he caught up to her’ • (Synchronically) a single pronominal prefix encodes properties of both arguments (written AGT>PAT)

  7. Generational age in Oneida (Iroquoian) (1) lo‑nulhá· 3ZOIC.SG>3MASC.SG‑mother ‘his mother’ (2) luwa-yʌha 3FEM.SG>3MASC.SG‑child ‘her son‘ • Subject assignment rule 1 (refers to generation): The argument that corresponds to the older generation maps onto the “Agent,” while the argument that corresponds to the younger generation maps onto the “Patient.”

  8. We must add Generational (and Absolute) age of the arguments in our list of event properties relevant to linking; • Rule 1 is not unique to Oneida, true of several “kin verbs” languages (e.g., Ilgar, Australia);

  9. The rule that targets a verb class • If a verbal stem denotes a kin relation, then the Agent>Patient prenominal prefix encodes properties of the generationally older>younger relata; • Aside from the content of the rule, nothing special about Oneida kin terms: • The content of rule 1 is different from other event-properties that affect linking to subject, but its form is similar: • for all X and Y, if MOTHER(X,Y), then X is generationally older than Y

  10. Conditional counter-expectations in Hindi ergative case marking • Hindi uses ergative case in sentences containing both transitive and intransitive verbs; • Rule 1: If the verb is transitive and perfective, the subject is assigned ergative case. • The situation is more complex for intransitive verbs;

  11. meinbahut log moujuudth-eephirbhiikiisii par court in many people present be-Past.3.Pl still bhiikuttee=nebhauunk-aataknahii any on also dog=Erg bark-M.Sg even neg ‘Many people were present in court but still the dog did not even bark at anyone.’ (2) Tansen=ne bas gungunaa-yaaaurbarishshuru ho gay-ii Tansen=Erg just hum-M.Sg and rain start be go-Perfv.F.S ‘Tansen (famous 15th century singer) just hummed and it started raining.’

  12. Conditional counter-expectations • Ergative case marks that it is surprising that the dogs didn’t bark and that Tansen only hummed and it rained (we would have expected singing to be required); • We can model the semantic contribution of Hindi intransitive ergative case-marking as follows: • It introduces a function that selects possible worlds in which Tansenacts: W → WTansen=Agent • A Kratzer-style analysis of unexpectedness applies on the resulting worlds: • WTansen=Agent → WTansen=Agent+expected • p not in WTansen=Agent+expected

  13. Rule for Hindi ergative case-marking on intransitive verbs • If the verb is intransitive and perfective, denotes a bodily function, and the action is unexpectedgiven the actor, then the subject is assigned ergative case (≠Butt, de Hoop and Narasimhan). khaas ‘cough’, chiikh ‘sneeze’, bhauk ‘bark’, ciik ‘scream’, cillaa ‘yell’, muut ‘urinate’, and thuuk ‘spit’ • Why only verbs denoting bodily functions are targeted is unclear.

  14. Conclusions • The rules for Oneida and Hindi lend “reality” to verbal kin stems and verbs denoting bodily functions, respectively: • These verbs behave as a class for a linguistic process; • The morphosyntactic processes is what make these classes useful

  15. Event classes • Talk of verb classes is often simply a short-hand for the event classes associated with various sets of verbs; • Selecting a class of verbs on the basis of shared event features can be a very useful discovery procedure or useful tool for purposes of experimental manipulations… • …but there is no guarantee that the resulting classes of verbs are “real” (are verb classes)?

  16. Outline 2. Two examples of the use of semantically coherent classes of verbs to answer foundational questions about what’s in a verb meaning a. (Semantic) arguments and adjuncts (Koenig et al., 2003) b. What kind of idiosyncratic information information verbs include?

  17. Syntactic optionality 1. John was chased by someone. Agent 2. John ate pizza. Patient 3. The refugees emigrated to Canada last year. Goal 4. The library provides web access to students. Recipient 5. John borrowed a book from Mary. Source Loc 6a. The knight beheaded the king with a sword. Obl. Instrument 6b. The knight killed the king with a sword. Opt. Instrument 7. Mark hid the picture in the closetParticipant Loc 8. Kim ate lunch in the park. Event Loc 9. John practiced piano yesterday. Event Time 10. The swimmer won the race with ease. Manner 11. Sue baked a cake for the PTA. Beneficiary

  18. Kenny’s problem • Given rampant syntactic optionality of postverbal dependants, how do we know how many argument positions a verb’s denotation has? (1) John ate→ John ate something (2) John ate → John ate somewhere… • How do we know that a participant role is part of the meaning of a verb ≈ strongly activated upon recognition of a verb?

  19. Frequency of expression won’t do (≠ McDonald et al., 1994) • Obligatory instruments: 8% (Brown) • Optional instruments: 10% (Brown) • Source locations: 20% (BNC; range: 1.4%- 50.4%) • Participant locations: 30% (BNC) • Event locations: 7.5-8.8 (BNC; range: .15%-93%)

  20. Category Utility (Corter and Gluck)/Mutual Information (Church and Hanks) • Literature on categorization might help here • “Utility” of a category depends on how many predictable features it has that not many categories have (that are distinctive): • Inversely proportional to the conditional probability of the feature given the category: How frequently tokens of an event category include feature (1/p(f) or-p(f)); • Proportional to p(f|c)

  21. Categories and feature activation • Features that are more distinctive of a category are more activated and activated more quickly than features shared with many other categories (Cree et al.; Sparck-Jones); • BANANA: HAS A PEEL >> HAS A SKIN • BUTTERFLY: HAS A COCOON >> HAS ANTENNAE

  22. Event categories and feature activation (1) Cordelia kissed Xanderin the library. (Event location) (2) Willow hid the amulet in her pocket. (Participant location) (3)Buffy expelled Spike from the club. (Source location) • Event-features = participant roles: • EXPEL: INVOLVES A SOURCE LOCATION >> OCCURS SOMEWHERE; • HIDE: INVOLVES A PARTICIPANT LOCATION >> OCCURS SOMEWHERE • The more distinctive a participant role is, the more quickly and strongly it should get activated; • Activation is proportional to 1/p(f) or to –p(f)

  23. Measuring distinctiveness • Two raters judged for the around 4,000 verbs they knew that: • 98% of verbs required an event location; • 14% of verbs required a source location; • 7% of verbs required a participant location; • Event locations should be weakly activated (semantic adjuncts); source/participant locations should be strongly activated (semantic arguments);

  24. Testing distinctiveness • The integration of WH-fillers into a sentence representation is sensitive to the lexical properties of a verb (Stowe; Boland); • This is true of PATIENT/THEME and RECIPIENT; • …But, we predict, also of the less frequently expressed semantic arguments like SOURCE and PARTICIPANT LOCATION

  25. Materials and methods • (In/From) which office | was the incompetent employee | reprimanded /dismiss| (in/from) [gap] by the manager | yesterday? • (In) which bush | were the squirrel’s acorns | eaten/hoarded | (in) [gap] by the chipmunk | last fall? • Non-accumulating moving window with stops-making-sense judgment; • Materials normed extensively for grammaticality/plausibility/plausibility of fillers as instruments/implausibility of fillers as patient

  26. Logic and predictions • Integration of WH-fillers into sentence representations should be easier when the relevant participant role is more quickly and more strongly activated; • Readers should take longer to read verb or post-verbal regions when location role feature is weakly activated by event category than when it is strongly activated by event category;

  27. Results (only source/event location contrast is shown, Conklin et al., 2004)

  28. Conclusions • Participant role distinctiveness affects the activation of a participant role (both for source and participant locations); • Our conditions grouped together verbs in terms of the location role they include: These verbs behave as a class. • Does that provide evidence of the “reality” of the class of participant and source location verbs?

  29. Co-occurrence of participant role and tokens of event category • Strength of association between category and features depends on how frequently tokens of an event category include participant role; • Activation proportional to p(f|c) • We concentrate on the end of the continuum: +/-Obligatory (which has a special linguistic status)

  30. Obligatory/Optional instruments Semantically Obligatory Instrument Verb The barbarian hacked someone with a sword during the attack Semantic Optional Instrument Verb The barbarianinjuredsomeone with a sword during the attack • Two raters judged for all the verbs they knew (about 4,000) whether their meaning required (12%) or merely allowed an instrument (35%).

  31. 0 Participant role information is used to generate expectations about who or what is going to be mentioned next • Altmann & Kamide (1999) ‘The boy will move the cake’ or ‘The boy will eat the cake

  32. 0 VisualMaterials (Bienvenue, forthcoming) • Visual display depicted • Agent, Instrument, two scene relevant distractors, NO Patient • Position counterbalanced across trials • Norming • Foils equally atypical as instruments for both sentences • On screen prior to, during and after sentence heard

  33. 0 Predictions • More anticipatory looks when instruments are obligatory than when they are optional (because instrument role feature is more activated in first case) • Anticipatory looks will emerge at the verb (because of early presentation of visual scene);

  34. More trials with looks to instruments in instrument argument than instrument adjunct sentencesDifferences emerge at verb

  35. What’s in a verb meaning? • Category utility/mutual information (low type frequency and high token frequency) provides a good solution to Kenny’s problem and a good model for the distinction between semantic arguments and adjuncts

  36. Classes of verbs or verb classes? • Our experiments (and other similar ones) show that as a group (1) verbs that require an instrument differ in a processing relevant way from verbs that allow an instrument and (2) verbs that have distinctive location roles differ in a processing relevant way from verbs that have non-distinctive location roles;

  37. …Just classes of verbs • These experiments do not demonstrate that +/- obligatory instrument or +/-distinctive location are an organizing principle of the verbal lexicon; • The similarity reduces to a similarity of event categories ; • The effect did not depend on substantive semantic similarities of verbs within each condition (they involve instruments/locations…), but on formal similarities (P(role) was low or P(role|category) was high);

  38. What’s in a meaning of a verb?A comprehensive look at a corner of semantic space

  39. Two distinct parts to the meaning of verbs • Carter/Levin and Rappaport: • Structural vs. idiosyncratic aspects of verb meaning: • Kill: CAUSE(X, BECOME(DEAD(Y))) • Questions: (1) What kind of information does idiosyncratic aspects of verb meaning encode? (2) Is the maximal complexity of structural meaning truly a single cause-effect pair? cause(s1, s2) vs. cause (s1, s2) and cause (s2, s3)

  40. A comprehensive look at a corner of semantic space (Koenig et al., 2008) • We examined the list of verbs that semantically require (≈500) or allow an instrument (≈1,300); • Classify them in terms of: • Subsituations: s1 (Agent and possibly instrument); s2 (Instrument and possibly patient); s3 (patient and possibly instrument) (s2 was not necessarily present); • s1 precedes s2; s2 precedes s3.

  41. Examples CUT. cause(s1, s2) ∧ act(s1, A, I) ∧ contact(s2, I, P) ∧ cause(s2, s3) ∧ incised(s3, P) 1. Incise : carve (a piece of wood), notch, plow, scratch, etch ; 2. Pierce : puncture, harpoon, knife, prick, lance ; 3. Sever : amputate, bone, core, eviscerate, castrate, gore, hack, prune, mow ; 4. Shred : shred, it includes grind, dice, cube, scallop, and mince ;

  42. DRUG: drug, gas, anesthesize, immunize, vaccinate, dope ; flavor season. cause(s1, s2) ∧ act(s1, A, I)∧ in (s2, I, P) ∧ cause(s2, s3) ∧ change-of-state(s3, P) FILL. cause(s1, s2) ∧ act(s1, A, I) ∧ in(s2, I, P) ∧ cause(s2, s3) ∧ change-of-configuration(s3, P) (1) Jim loaded the truck with boxes with a forklift

  43. SKI. Canoe, bicycle, skate, drive, toboggan. cause(s1, s2) ∧ act(s1, A, I)∧ pred2(s2, I, A) ∧ and ∧ part-cause+(s2, s3) ∧ movemanner(s3, A) SCOOP. Spoon, pump, milk, sponge, ladle, shovel, siphon. cause(s1, s2) ∧ act(s1, A, I) ∧ in(s2, P, I) ∧ enable(s2, s3) ∧ go-to(s3, P, Z) (1) The plug’s coming loose let the water flow from the tank.

  44. EAT. • Very large class withlittlesemanticcoherence: a. Jean doesn’t know how to eat with chopsticks. b. Jill drank her soda with a straw. c. Ryan watched the bird with his new binoculars. d. Alicia lectures with overheads rather than with handouts. e. Joan hunted the turkey with a bow and arrows. f. He plays volleyball with gloves. g. Susan always practices the piano with a metronome. h. Max repaired the faulty switch with a screwdriver. help+(s1, s3) ∧ pred2(s1, A, I) ∧ pred1(s3, P)

  45. What do you get for classifying 1,800 verbs? • Expansion of maximum bound on structural semantic complexity is needed, but limited: use of tools; • Idiosyncratic information specifies more instrument activity andchange of state in patient thanagent activity; • Anotherexample of goal bias (voir Lakusta and Landau (2005)) and lexical reification of discourse distribution (Slobin (2004)) ?

  46. 3. There is variation in causal relation between subsituations, suggesting that root meanings might sometimes be molecular a. John watches birds all day with his binoculars. b. Bill cooks his steaks with butter. c. Floyd baked the cake with yeast. d. Bill entered Joan’s room with a duplicate key. e. Joe scooped the ice-cream with a wooden spoon. f. Connie skied down the slope with her new skis. g. Alisa walks her cat with a leash.

  47. s2 can be the true cause of the final change of state s3: cut • s2 can be the cause of a precondition of the change of state s3: open • s2 can be one of a joint set of causes of the change of state s3: ski • s2 can enable a change of location s3: scoop • s2 can cause the event/action to lead to a better resulting state or to be performed better: cook with butter

  48. An intensional analysis of “helping” • Definition 1 An eventuality e1 helps the occurrence of token e2 of the event category C iff (i) there is an ordering of tokens of C along a pragmatically defined scale (ease of performance, how good the resulting state is, fewer unwelcome “side-effects”); (ii) e1 caused the token e2 of C to be higher on that ordering than it would otherwise have been.

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