Coordination as a Direct Process

Coordination as a Direct Process Augusta Mela LIPN-CNRS URA 1507 Universit6 de Paris XIII 93 430 Villetaneuse FRANCE am@uralS07, univ-par is 13. fr Christophe Fouquer6 LIPN-CNRS URA 1507 Universit4 de Paris XIII 93 430 Villetaneuse FRANCE cf ~ura1507. univ-par is 13. fr Abstract We propose a treatment of coordination based on the concepts of functor, argument and subcategorization. Its formalization comprises two parts which are conceptually independent. On one hand, we have ex- tended the feature structure unification to disjunctive and set values in order to check the compatibility and the satisfiability of subcategorization requirements by struc- tured complements. On the other hand, we have considered the conjunction e$ (and) as the head of the coordinate structure, so that coordinate structures stem simply from the subcategorization specifications of et and the general schemata of a head sat- uration. Both parts have been encoded within HPSG using the same resource that is the subcategorization and its principle which we have just extended. (1) Jean danse la vMse et le tango (Jean dances the waltz and the tango.) (2) Je sais son gge et qu'elle est venue ici. (I know her age and that she came here.) (3) Un livre int4ressant et que j'aurai du plaisir & lire. (An interesting book and which I will enjoy to read.) (4) Je demande & Pierre son v61o et & Marie sa canne & p~che. (I ask Peter for his bike and Mary for her fishing rod.) (5) Pierre vend un v61o et donne une canne k p~che g Marie. (Peter sells a bike and gives a fishing rod to Mary.) We claim here that the "local combinatory poten- tial" of lexical heads, encoded in the subcategoriza- tion feature, explains the previous linguistic facts: conjuncts may be of different categories as well as of more than one constituent, they just have to satisfy the subcategorization constraints. 1 Introduction Coordination has Mways been a centre of academic interest, be it in linguistic theory or in computa- tional linguistics. The problem is that the assump- tion according to only the constituents of the same category (1) may be conjoined is false; indeed, coor- dinations of different categories (2)-(3) and of more than one constituent (4)-(5) should not be dismissed though being marginal in written texts and must he accounted for 1. 1This research has been done for the French coordi- nation et (and). We focus here on the coordination of syntagmatic categories (as opposite of lexical categories). More precisely, we account for cases of non constituent coordination (4), of Right Node Raising (5) but not for cases of Gapping. Our approach which is independent of any frame- work, is easily and precisely encoded in the for- malism of Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) (Pollard and Sag, 1994), which is based on the notion of head and makes available the feature sharing mechanism we need. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 gives a brief description of ba- sic data and discusses some constraints and avail- …

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