Handling Wolof clitics in LFG

Dione, Cheikh Bamba

doi:10.1075/la.206.04dio

Cited by 3 publications

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Variable subject pronoun expression in Cabo-Verdean Creole

Rodríguez-Riccelli

2021

JPCL

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The Cabo-Verdean Creole (CVC) subject domain has clitic and tonic pronouns that often amalgamate in double subject pronoun constructions; the possibility of a zero-subject and the formal category underlying subject clitics are disputed (Baptista 1995, 2002; Pratas 2004). This article discusses five variable constraints that condition subject expression across three descriptive and inferential analyses of a corpus of speech collected from 33 speakers from Santiago and Maio. Double subject pronoun constructions and zero-subjects were promoted by a persistence effect, though for the former this applied across nonadjacent clauses since double subject pronoun constructions are switch reference and contrastive devices resembling the doubling of agreement suffixes by independent pronouns in languages traditionally classified as pro-drop. Zero-subjects were favored in third-person contexts as previously observed by Baptista and Bayer (2013), and when a semantically referentially deficient (Duarte & Soares da Silva 2016) DP antecedent was in an Intonational Unit that was prosodically and syntactically linked to the Intonational Unit containing the target anaphor (Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019). Results support reclassification of CVC subject clitics as ambiguous person agreement markers (Siewierska 2004) and suggest that CVC is developing a split-paradigm for person marking and subject expression (Wratil 2009; Baptista & Bayer 2013).

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Variable subject pronoun expression in Cabo-Verdean Creole

Rodríguez-Riccelli

2021

JPCL

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LFG parse disambiguation for Wolof

Dione

2014

JLM

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This paper presents several techniques for managing ambiguity in LFG parsing of Wolof, a less-resourced Niger-Congo language. Ambiguity is pervasive in Wolof and This raises a number of theoretical and practical issues for managing ambiguity associated with different objectives. From a theoretical perspective, the main aim is to design a large-scale grammar for Wolof that is able to make linguistically motivated disambiguation decisions, and to find appropriate ways of controlling ambiguity at important interface representations. The practical aim is to develop disambiguation strategies to improve the performance of the grammar in terms of efficiency, robustness and coverage.To achieve these goals, different avenues are explored to manage ambiguity in the Wolof grammar, including the formal encoding of noun class indeterminacy, lexical specifications, the use of Constraint Grammar models (Karlsson 1990) for morphological disambiguation, the application of the c-structure pruning mechanism (Cahill et al. 2007, 2008; Crouch et al. 2013), and the use of optimality marks for preferences (Frank et al. 1998, 2001). The parsing system is further controlled by packing ambiguities. In addition, discriminant-based techniques for parse disambiguation (Rosén et al. 2007) are applied for treebanking purposes.

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Developing Universal Dependencies for Wolof

Dione¹

2019

Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2019)

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This paper presents work on the creation of a Universal Dependency (UD) treebank for Wolof as the first UD treebank within the Northern Atlantic branch of the Niger-Congo languages. The paper reports on various issues related to word segmentation for tokenization and the mapping of PoS tags, morphological features and dependency relations to existing conventions for annotating Wolof. It also outlines some specific constructions as a starting point for discussing several more general UD annotation guidelines, in particular for noun class marking, deixis encoding, and focus marking.

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Handling Wolof clitics in LFG

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Variable subject pronoun expression in Cabo-Verdean Creole

Variable subject pronoun expression in Cabo-Verdean Creole

LFG parse disambiguation for Wolof

Developing Universal Dependencies for Wolof

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