Case Syncretism in German Definite Articles: New High German

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New High German (NHG; 1500-... AD)

• Computational Reconstruction

• Example of Parsing

• Example of Production

Computational Reconstruction

This part of the demonstration supports section 2.3 of the paper.

Nouns

NHG-nouns have two numbers (singular and plural) and three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter). Differences in declension classes are ignored in the reconstruction in order to make it possible to treat NHG-nouns on equal footing with nouns in Old High German, which had more declension classes. Here is an example of a lexical construction for Maenner 'men'. You can click on the construction's units to see a fully expanded feature structure:

The construction consists of a semantic pole (on the left) and a syntactic pole (on the right). The syntactic pole contains a.o. the noun's AGR(eement) features (NUMBER and PERSON), and a SYN-ROLE (syntactic role) that contains the noun's 'case-spec' (case-number-gender specification). You can click on the ++-symbol to see how the noun's case-spec expands into a feature matrix representation (a processing-friendly representation for morphological paradigms).

Verbs

Verbal lexical entries contain a SEM-VALENCE (semantic valence; in which the verb specifies which semantic roles it can assign) and a SYN-VALENCE (syntactic valence; in which the verb specifies which argument structure constructions it is associated with). In the SYN-VALENCE feature, the verb may additionally impose selection restrictions on its arguments, such as [ANIMATE +]. Here is an example of the verb form gaben 'gave.3.PL':

Definite Articles

The NHG-system of definite articles is more opaque than the OHG-system due to syncretic forms:

CASE	SINGULAR			PLURAL
	M	N	F	M/N/F
NOM	der	das	die	die
ACC	den	das	die	die
DAT	dem	dem	der	den

For each article, a morphological construction is implemented that consists of two syntactic poles. The left syntactic pole (the function pole) contains the article's case-number-gender specification. The right syntactic pole (the form pole) contains the article's form. In order to see the full feature structure representation of the article's case spec, click on the symbol ++. Here is the morphological construction for die:

Grammatical Constructions

The reconstruction also features two types of grammatical constructions: phrasal constructions, which impose case-number-gender agreement between articles and their head nouns, and argument structure constructions, which assign case to a verb's arguments in production, and which perform argument linking in parsing. Both types of grammatical constructions are implemented using FCG's design patterns for phrasal and argument structure constructions.

Example of Parsing: Die Maenner gaben den Freundinnen die Geschenke

Here, a quick demonstration is shown of how the NHG-grammar is able to parse the utterance Die Maenner gaben den Freundinnen die Geschenke 'The men gave the female friends the gifts'. Parsing is data-driven and uses a depth-first search strategy. The green boxes show the result of applying one construction. You can click on every box and unit to see more information about processing.

Applying

construction set (9)

in direction ←

Example of Production:

Production uses the same linguistic inventory, but goes in the other direction. Here, the speaker needs to verbalize a meaning into an utterance. You can check the starting meaning by clicking on the semantic pole of the initial structure at the beginning of the production task.

Applying

construction set (9)

in direction →

Resulting utterance (word order is fairly free): Die Maenner gaben den Freundinnen die Geschenke