A memory-based approach to the treatment of serial verb construction in combinatory categorial grammar

Abstract

CCG, one of the most prominent grammar frameworks, efficiently deals with deletion under coordination in natural languages. However, when we expand our attention to more analytic languages whose degree of pro-dropping is more free, CCG's decomposition rule for dealing with gapping becomes incapable of parsing some patterns of intra-sentential ellipses in serial verb construction. Moreover, the decomposition rule might also lead us to over-generation problem. In this paper the composition rule is replaced by the use of memory mechanism, called CCG-MM. Fillers can be memorized and gaps can be induced from an input sentence in functional application rules, while fillers and gaps are associated in coordination and serialization. Multimodal slashes, which allow or ban memory operations, are utilized for ease of resource management. As a result, CCG-MM is more powerful than canonical CCG, but its generative power can be bounded by partially linear indexed grammar. © 2009 Association for Computational Linguistics.