Resolving Multiple Wh-Fragments: A Syntax-Pragmatics Approach

What it is about

The paper studies "multiple sluicing": two wh-remnants standing alone as one utterance, as in "Which student, with which professor?" or "I can't tell you who what". It compares two earlier accounts. A copy-deletion account (Park and Kang 2007) has trouble with the ungrammatical source it implies and with the remnants whose antecedent comes only in later turns. A gapping account (Nishigauchi 1998; Lasnik 2007) cannot allow embedding, a non-wh remnant, or parallel elements. The author adopts the HPSG fragment analysis of Bertomeu and Kordoni (2005), where a fragment is a non-head daughter resolved through the discourse record, and adds a subtype for multiple wh-fragments. The constraint requires exactly two wh-remnants, an empty store at the mother, and no extraction. Embedding is allowed only under factive or resolutive verbs (know, tell, discover) and is resisted under question-embedding verbs (ask, wonder). The paper is theoretical; it gives examples, not counts.

Ideas

• I1. Count-free test set: take the paper's examples (2a), (2b), (7), (8a), (8b), (10a), (21a), (21b) and the negative cases ("*Peter ___ with Susie, and John danced with Elisabeth") and run them through the fragment handler in world/src/qa.rs. Pass if two wh-slots are filled from the antecedent, fail if a non-wh remnant or a parallel element is accepted.
• I2. A lexical feature resolutive in the dictionary (en/src/dict.rs): know, tell, discover, forget, guess accept a multiple-wh remnant as an object; ask, wonder, investigate, discuss do not. Keep the verb list in a BTreeMap and test the contrast in (2b) against (21b) of the paper, with a negative control on the ask/wonder class.
• I3. Label each fragment with the paper's two resolution types: semantic-structural (the antecedent's clause is still in a discourse buffer of the last k utterances) or semantic-conceptual (the referent is in the focus stack, or resolved by a script). Use the buffer length as a parameter and report how often the buffer of one turn is enough, since example (7) needs three turns.
• I4. Use the paper's distribution of remnants as a deterministic check on the fragment parser: a fragment with two wh-words is a multiple wh-fragment; with one wh-word and one name it is a gapping candidate and needs a parallel antecedent.

For Mova

The chapters are 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure (fragments, sluicing and gapping), 23. Complementation (embedding under know and wonder) and 38. Dialogue, discourse markers and reported speech (short replies in dialogue). The code is world/src/qud.rs and world/src/qa.rs for the question under discussion and the answer to a fragment, world/src/reader.rs for the discourse buffer, and en/src/dict.rs for the verb feature. The measure is the pass rate on the paper's example set, with the negative examples counted as failures if accepted, run twice to confirm it is identical.

Topics: Coreference resolution

Cite

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

@inproceedings{park2009resolving,
  title = {{Resolving Multiple Wh-Fragments: A Syntax-Pragmatics Approach}},
  author = {Park, Sang-Hee},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 23rd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, Volume 2},
  year = {2009},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/Y09-2001/}
}

References

11 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Bolinger, D. 1978. Asking more than one Thing at a Time. In H. Hiz, ed., Questions, pp. 107-150. Dordrecht: Reidel. find
2. Bertomeu, N. and V. Kordoni. 2005. Integrating Pragmatic Information in Grammar. An Analysis of Intersentential Ellipsis. In S. Müller, ed., Proceedings of the HPSG05 Conference. find
3. Ginzburg, J. and I. A. Sag. 2000. Interrogative Investigations: The Form, Meaning, and Use of English Interrogatives. Stanford: CSLI. find
4. Lasnik, H. 2007. Multiple Sluicing. A handout given in LING 819 Spring 2007. University of Maryland. find
5. Merchant, J. 2001. The Syntax of Silence: Sluicing, Islands, and the Theory of Ellipsis. Oxford. find
6. Nishigauchi, T. 1998. ‘Multiple Sluicing’ in Japanese and the Functional Nature of Wh-Phrases. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 7, pp. 121-152. find
7. Park, M.-K. and J.-M. Kang. 2007. Some Remarks on Multiple Sluicing in English. Studies in Generative Grammar, 17(1), pp. 419-434. find
8. Richard, N. 2001. Movement in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. find
9. Romero, M. 1997. Recoverability Conditions for Sluicing. In F. Corblin et al., eds., Empirical Issues in Formal Syntax and Semantics. pp. 193-216. Peter Lang: Bern. find
10. Takahashi, D. 1994. Sluicing in Japanese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 3, pp. 263-300. find
11. This term is adopted from Ginzburg and Sag (2000). find

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