Buenos días! This web page provides interactive examples of a fully operational FCG implementation on Spanish modals. You can click on all the boxes to see more details of the constructions that are displayed or to expand the application process of a certain meaning or utterance. This demonstration supports the following paper:
Beuls Katrien (2012). Spanish Modals in Fluid Construction Grammar. In: Luc Steels (Ed.) Computational Issues in Fluid Construction Grammar . Springer: Berlin.
We recommend using Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome for an optimal viewing of this page.
Spanish morphology is characterized by a considerable degree of syncretism. We will here show an example of the "-amos" suffix, which is used to mark 1pl present and 1pl past perfect on verbs that fall into the first conjugation class. Parsing a sentence such as "Bailamos la macarena!" results thus in an ambiguous time alocation for the dance event. It can either mean "We dance the macarena!" or "We danced the macarena!". This is illustrated by the split in the parse tree after the amos-morph could apply:
| solution 1 | |||||||||
| solution 2 | |||||||||
A defining feature of Spanish phonology is its diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, in stressed contexts (e.g. Lat. petram > Sp. piedra). This difference in stress pattern has been preserved in the current stem morphology, which has lead to four main cases that a language user has to account for when conjugating a verb in Spanish:
An example of (1) has been given in the first demonstration on syncretism ("bailamos"). You find an example conjugation of case (2) below. All four cases have been implemented. For more information on (3) and (4), please contact the author.
The verb "volver" ("return") changes its stem into "vuelv-" in the indicative and subjunctive present singular and third person plural. Due to this variation, the lexical construction only contains the infinitival form and it is the stem constructions that translate this form into an actual stem ("volv-" or "vuelv-").
|
|
Let us now turn to the actual processing of two verb forms that have different stems. The production processes of "vuelvo" and "volvemos" are displayed below. To get a glimpse of the parsing processes, go to the last search node and click on it twice.
| initial structure | ||||
| application process | ||||
| applied constructions | ||||
| resulting transient structure | ||||
| resulting utterance | ("vuelv" "o") |
| initial structure | ||||
| application process | ||||
| applied constructions | ||||
| resulting transient structure | ||||
| resulting utterance | ("volv" "emos") |
Now that all morpho-phonological machinery for dealing with the Spanish conjugational paradigm has been introduced, it is time to move on to the real topic of this demonstration: modals in FCG. Modals allow the speaker to take a subjective position according to a given proposition. The following FCG processing examples show how different degrees of belief can be expressed in this FCG grammar. Apart from the modal lexical constructions such as the
, one modal construction had to be added to the construction inventory: . This construction makes a modal verb phrase out of the combination of a modal auxiliary and a main verb.| initial structure | ||||
| application process | ||||
| applied constructions | ||||
| resulting transient structure | ||||
| resulting utterance | ("ana" "est" "a" "cansad" "a") |
| initial structure | |||||||||
| application process | |||||||||
| applied constructions | |||||||||
| resulting transient structure | |||||||||
| resulting utterance | ("ana" "pued" "e" "estar" "cansad" "a") |
Part 2 has shown that the indicative is the default mood that modal constructions assign to the finite verb form of a clause. The current section shows how this default can be overridden through the application of an additional modal construction that has scope over the indicative verb form. The sentence that illustrates this scoping process builds further on the previous example sentence:
| initial structure | |||||||||||||||||||
| application process | |||||||||||||||||||
| applied constructions | |||||||||||||||||||
| resulting transient structure | |||||||||||||||||||
| resulting utterance | ("dud" "o" "que" "ana" "pued" "a" "estar" "cansad" "a") |