A Tree Adjoining Grammar Analysis of the Syntax and Semantics of It-Clefts

What it is about

In "It was Ohno who won" the cleft pronoun it and the cleft clause "who won" are argued to form one discontinuous constituent, which is a definite description. The paper rejects the expletive analysis, using the fact that the cleft pronoun can be this or that in discourse (Hedberg 2000), and the fact that a proper name can be the clefted constituent, which a head noun of a restrictive relative cannot be. The syntax is a tree-local Multi-Component TAG: the element for it and the element for the relative clause are one multi-component set, so their link is kept without a syntactic constituent in the derived tree. The semantics, given in a synchronous TAG, is a definite quantified phrase, THE z [won(z)] [z = Ohno]. Equative readings ("It was Ohno who won") and predicational readings ("It was a kid who beat John") come from the same frame, with the focus either a proper name or a property. It also covers wh-extraction and coordination of two clefts. There are no counts or experiments.

Ideas

• I1. Cleft frame in prag: "It was X who V-ed" is stored as the definite description "the one who V-ed was X", so that a question about who won gets the same answer for the cleft and the plain sentence. Test on pairs of school sentences (cleft and plain) that must give the same answer.
• I2. Predicational or equative reading as a rule: a focus that is a proper name gives an equative frame (z = X); a common-noun focus with an indefinite article gives a predicational frame (kid(z)). Implement in prag/src/frames.rs with the rule shown in the frame, and count the cases on the school texts.
• I3. Existence and uniqueness presupposition: a cleft asserts that exactly one entity satisfies the clause. Store this as a presupposition in world/src/knowledge.rs and let the who-question code answer "who else?" from it.
• I4. Coreference inside clefts: a reflexive in the clefted position may take its antecedent from the cleft clause (the paper's Percus data). Add this case to coref/src/sieve.rs as an explicit rule, and measure coref F1 on the cleft sentences of the held-out set.
• I5. Keep the TAG idea out of the parser: the multi-component link can be stored as a pair of tree ids in the parse output, not as a grammar formalism. This keeps the output explainable without adding a new grammar engine.

For Mova

Clefts and information structure: 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure; definiteness and the one-who form: 12. Pronouns, determiners and numerals; the relative clause: 25. Relative clauses; presupposition: 33. Implicature and presupposition; reference: 35. Reference and coreference. Code: prag/src/frames.rs and prag/src/infer.rs (cleft frame, readings), world/src/knowledge.rs (presupposition), coref/src/sieve.rs (cleft binding). Measure: answer agreement on cleft and plain pairs, and the reading assignment accuracy, run twice for determinism.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{han2006tree,
  title = {{A Tree Adjoining Grammar Analysis of the Syntax and Semantics of It-Clefts}},
  author = {Han, Chung-hye and Hedberg, Nancy},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammar and Related Formalisms},
  year = {2006},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W06-1505/}
}

References

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