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Berthold Crysmann: Underspecification of Intersective Modifier Attachment: Some Arguments from German
In this paper, I shall discuss the semantic attachment of intersective
modifiers in German coherent constructions. I shall show that a purely
syntactic solution to the observable attachment ambiguity is undesirable for
reasons of processing e ciency and/or massive spurious ambiguity. Instead, I
shall follow Egg and Lebeth (1995) and propose an extension to Minimal
Recursion Semantics, permitting the expression of underspecified semantic
attachment. This rather trivial move, as we shall see, will not only be
preferable for processing reasons, but it will also be more in line with the
spirit of underspecified semantics, e ectively providing a compact
representation of purely semantic distinctions, instead of unfolding these
distinctions into a rain forest of tree representations and derivations. I will
present an implementation of the underspecification approach integrated into
the German HPSG developed at DFKI and compare its e ciency to an alternative
implementation where semantic attachment is unfolded by means of retrieval
rules.
Maintained by Stefan Müller
Created: October 18, 2004
Last modified: March 10, 2008
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