Features and Agreement

Features and Agreement Sam Bayer and Mark Johnson* Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Box 1978 Brown University { b ayer,mj } @cog.brown.edu Abstract This paper compares the consislency- based account of agreement phenomena in 'unification-based' grammars with an implication-based account based on a sim- ple feature extension to Lambek Catego- rim Grammar (LCG). We show that the LCG treatment accounts for constructions that have been recognized as problematic for 'unification-based' treatments. 1 Introduction This paper contrasts the treatment of agreement phenomena in standard complex feature structure or 'unification-based' grammars such as HPSG (Pol- lard and Sag, 1994) with that of perhaps the sim- plest possible feature extension to Lambek Catego- rial Grammar (LCG) (Lambek, 1958). We iden- tify a number of situations where the two accounts make different predictions, and find that gener- ally the LCG account is superior. In the pro- cess we provide analyses for a number of construc- tions that have been recognized as problematic for 'unification-based' accounts of agreements (Zaenen and Karttunen, 1984; Pullum and Zwicky, 1986; In- gria, 1990). Our account builds on the analysis of coordination in applicative categorial grammar in Bayer (1994) and the treatment of Boolean connec- tives in LCG provided by Morrill (1992). Our anal- ysis is similiar to that proposed by Mineur (1993), but differs both in its application and details. The rest of the paper is structured as follows. The next section describes the version of LCG we use in this paper; for reasons of space we assume familiar- ity with the treatment of agreement in 'unification- based' grammars, see Shieber (1986) and Pollard and Sag (1994) for details. Then each of the follow- *We would like to thank Bob Carpenter, Pauline Ja- cobson, John Maxwell, Glynn Morrill and audiences at Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Universit£t Stuttgart for helpful comments on this work. Naturally all errors remain our own. ing sections up to the conclusion discusses an impor- tant difference between the two approaches. 2 Features in Lambek Categorial Grammar In LCG semantic interpretation and long distance dependencies are handled independently of the fea- ture system, so agreement phenomena seem to be the major application of a feature system for LCG. Since only a finite number of feature distinctions need to be made in all the cases of agreement we know of, we posit only a very simple feature system here. Roughly speaking, features will be treated as atomic propositions (we have no need to separate them into attributes and values), and a simple cat- egory will be a Boolean combination of such atomic 'features' (since we have no reason to posit a re- cursive feature structures either). In fact we are agnostic as to whether more complex feature sys- tems for LCG are linguistically justified; in any event Dorre et. al. (1994) show how a full attribute-value feature structure system having the properties de- scribed here can be incorporated into LCG. Following the standard formulation of LCG, we regard the standard LCG connectives '/' and …

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