Variable Modality in Pintupi-Luritja Purposive Clauses

Gray, Jennifer

doi:10.3390/languages6010052

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…1 Not all languages are like English: some exhibit so-called variable force modals, which specify flavor but not force. This has been found at least in St'át'icmets (Rullmann et al, 2008a), Nez Perce (Deal, 2011), Old English (Yanovich, 2016), and Pintupi-Luritja (Gray, 2021). We illustrate the phenomenon with elicited examples of St'át'icmets k'a: 2 (5)…”

Section: Context Expressionmentioning

confidence: 76%

Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP

2022

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In this talk I will describe the benefit of implemented grammars as well as the challenges involved in creating them. I present an inference system that can be used to automatically generate such grammars on the basis of interlinear glossed text (IGT) corpra. The inference system, called BASIL -Building Analyses from Syntactic Inference in Local Languages, leverages typologically informed heuristics to infer syntactic and morphological information from linguistic corpora to select analyses that model the language. We will engage with the question of whether and to what extent typological features are apparent in IGT data and how effectively grammars generated with these features can model human language.Bio: Kristen Howell is a data scientist at LivePerson Inc. in Seattle, Washington. Her research interests range from grammar engineering and grammar inference to conversational NLP. Throughout this research, the common thread is multilingual NLP across typologically diverse languages. Kristen received her PhD from the University of Washington in 2020, where she engaged with typological literature to develop technology for automatically generating grammars for local languages. Recent work at LivePerson has focused on multilingual NLP, leveraging deep learning techniques for conversational AI.

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Section: Context Expressionmentioning

confidence: 76%

Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP

2022

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“…1 Not all languages are like English: some exhibit so-called variable force modals, which specify flavor but not force. This has been found at least in St'át'icmets (Rullmann et al, 2008a), Nez Perce (Deal, 2011), Old English (Yanovich, 2016), and Pintupi-Luritja (Gray, 2021) (2008a) shows that k'a can only be used with epistemic flavor, so it is an example with lexically specified flavor but variable force. Finally, some languages have modals which exhibit variability along both the force and flavor axes.…”

Section: Expressionmentioning

confidence: 96%

A Database for Modal Semantic Typology

Guo¹,

Imel²,

Steinert‐Threlkeld³

2022

Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP

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This paper introduces a database for crosslinguistic modal semantics. The purpose of this database is to (1) enable ongoing consolidation of modal semantic typological knowledge into a repository according to uniform data standards and to (2) provide data for investigations in crosslinguistic modal semantic theory and experiments explaining such theories. We describe the kind of semantic variation that the database aims to record, the format of the data, and a current snapshot of the database, emphasizing access and contribution to the database in light of the goals above. We release the database at https://clmbr.shane.st/ modal-typology.

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“…2 Not all languages are like English: some exhibit so-called variable force modals, which specify flavor but not force. This has been found at least in St'át'imcets (Rullmann, Matthewson & Davis 2008), Nez Perce (Deal 2011), Old English (Yanovich 2016), and Pintupi-Luritja (Gray 2021 (2008) shows that k'a can only be used with epistemic flavor, so it is an example with lexically specified flavor but variable force. The discussed semantic variation across English and St'át'imcets is summarized by Table 1.…”

Section: Modal Semantics and Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 96%

Modal semantic universals optimize the simplicity/informativeness trade-off

Imel¹,

Steinert‐Threlkeld²

2022

SALT

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The meanings expressed by the world’s languages have been argued to support efficient communication. Evidence for this hypothesis has drawn on cross-linguistic analyses of vocabulary in semantic domains of both content words (e.g. kinship terms (Kemp & Regier 2012); color terms (Regier, Kay & Khetarpal 2007; Zaslavsky, Kemp, Regier & Tishby 2018)) and function words (e.g.quantifiers(Steinert-Threlkeld2021); indefinite pronouns(Deni ́c, Steinert-Threlkeld & Szymanik 2022)) approaching the hypothesis concretely in terms of a trade-off between simplicity and informativeness. We apply the analysis to modals (e.g. can, ought, might). Two proposed universals in this domain from Nauze (2008) and Vander Klok (2013) are used for generating many artificial languages with varying degrees of quasi-naturalness as a proxy for natural data. A computational experiment shows that most of the optimal solutions to the trade-off problem are predicted by Vander Klok; meanwhile, as languages more robustly satisfy Nauze’s universal, they also become more optimal. This suggests that efficient communication is a leading explanation for constraints on modal semantic variation.

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Variable Modality in Pintupi-Luritja Purposive Clauses

Cited by 3 publications

References 27 publications

Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP

Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP

A Database for Modal Semantic Typology

Modal semantic universals optimize the simplicity/informativeness trade-off

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