FeforPng

This topic arose because of an issue at the intersection of transfer (harmonizing (R)MRSs across languages) and within-language efficiency. In many languages, the agreement facts motivate underspecification (e.g., the type "non third-singular" for English subject-verb agreement), but the exact shape of that underspecification varies from language to language. If two languages don't have the same set of underspecified types in their hierarchies, transfer becomes painful. On the other hand, if two languages do have the same potential for underspecification, it would be nice to preserve that rather than redundantly spell out all of the possibilities in the target language.

The proposal we arrived at was to come up with a grammar-external representation for transfer (not necessarily really a type hierarchy) that includes nodes for all of the possible underspecifications (a power set) of person and number combinations. Individual grammars will provide a mapping from their own types into this external representation. The generator should (? already does?) allow for specialization of feature values in order to generate from an underspecified input.

The external resource would only include person and number, because these draw on a relatively small vocabularly in the world's languages (3, maybe 4 persons, up to about 5 number distinctions) and because this information should be preserved in transfer.

This contrasts with gender which generally shouldn't be preserved in transfer. Certainly not for NPs (i.e., grammatical gender), and in the case of pronouns, the right thing is probably to do reference resolution first and then choose the properties of the target language pronoun on the basis of the properties of the referent/antecedent.

However, the solution proposed here should allow gender to be included in the types used for underspecification within languages (e.g., German <i>sie</i> which is 3sg feminine or 3pl) --- the mapping out could 'lose' the gender information. Doing this would require including gender in the MRS, which is perhaps controversial.

The alternative proposal for gender is to include it not as a feature but by subtyping pronoun relations (such that gender in effect only appears in the MRS in pronouns). Thus English would have _he_n_rel, _she_n_rel, _it_n_rel, _they_n_rel (briefly worry about redundant specification of number contrast in feature and type). This information is of value for reference resolution, which operates on (R)MRSs.

It's clear that gender must be represented as a feature *somewhere* because many languages show agreement in gender (or more generally, noun class). On the other hand, this could be done with a syntactic AGR feature.