A Pregroup Analysis of Japanese Causatives

A Pregroup Analysis of Japanese Causatives * Kumi Cardinal Keio University, Shonan-Fujisawa Campus, Graduate School of Media and Governance 5322 Endo, Fujisawa-shi, Kanagawa 252-8520, Japan cardinal@sfc.keio.ac.jp Abstract. We explore a computational algebraic approach to grammar via pregroups. We examine how the structures of Japanese causatives can be treated in the framework of a pregroup grammar. In our grammar, the dictionary assigns one or more syntactic types to each word and the grammar rules are used to infer types to strings of words. We developed a practical parser representing our pregroup grammar, which validates our analysis. Keywords: pregroup grammar, Japanese causatives. 1. Introduction Japanese causatives have been analyzed from a number of points of view: transformational, lexical, and movement approaches among others. Here, I propose a computational method for analyzing the different types of causative constructions. Our analysis is based on the notion of pregroup grammar, which has been developed as an algebraic tool to recognize grammatically well-formed sentences in natural languages (Lambek, 1999). This paper is organized as follows: section 2 introduces the pregroup formalism; section 3 describes the properties and characteristics of Japanese causatives; section 4 presents the analysis of Japanese causatives based on pregroup grammar; and finally, section 5 discusses about the implementation of a practical parser. 2. Pregroup grammar The main idea of a pregroup grammar, which is shared with other categorial grammars, is to assign one (or more) compound types to each word of the language and to check the grammaticality of sentences by doing a calculation on strings of types. We construct the compound types in the following way: we begin with a partially ordered set (A, →) of basic types, the partial order being denoted by the arrow. From the basic types we build simple types by taking adjoints or repeated adjoints. Thus from the basic type a, we obtain the simple types …, all, al, a, ar, arr, … Compound types are strings of simple types. We then form the free pregroup generated by A, whose elements are compound types. The only computations required are contractions ala → 1, aar → 1, and expansions 1 → aal, 1 → ara, where a is a simple type. * Copyright 2007 by Kumi Cardinal 96 One can extend the operation ()l and ()r to compound types, by defining 1l = 1 = 1r, (a・b)l = bl・al, (a・b)r = br・ar. The symbol 1 stands for the empty string of types and will be usually omitted, as will be the dot that stands for multiplication. What makes free pregroups particularly suitable for computation is the following observation: SWITCHING LEMMA (Lambek, 1999) When showing that x1… xm → y1 … yn for simple types xi and yi, one may assume without loss of generality that all contractions ala → 1 and aar → 1 precede all expansions 1 → aal and 1 → ara. The importance of the Switching Lemma is that it offers a deciding procedure, by a sequence of contractions, when a string of simple types …

Content truncated to 500 words