CNL Lunch

John Drury, Philip Resnik, Amy Weinberg, Silvia Gennari & Sachiko Aoshima

Frequency, Argument Structure Saturation, and Constraint Satisfaction

Thursday March 14th, 12:30pm, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

Two logically distinct ideas tend to be linked in recent processing literature. The first is the idea that structural parsing preferences, originally seen as governed by internally driven grammatical principles (such as the Theta Criterion); should in fact be anayzed as a direct reflection of the frequency of occurence of the preferred reading, as measured in corpora. The second idea is that frequency competes with
other factors in a parallel constraint based architecture. We investigate both these claims by consideration of the class of reciprocal verbs (e.g.'John and Mary kissed'), first discussed by Ferreira and McClure. We will show that the constraint based architecture is illuminating, but that this case shows that grammatically based preferences must be direct participants in constraint ranking. They cannot be seen as epiphenomena of real frequency preferences.