Modeling Light Verb Constructions in the LinGO Grammar Matrix

Abstract

This thesis describes the development of a library for modeling light verb constructions (LVCs) in the LinGO Grammar Matrix. LVCs are constructions involving the combination of a light verb and coverb, where the coverb contributes most of the meaning to the whole construction. Light verbs can range in meaning from semantically “light” to semantically bleached and coverbs can come from a variety of word classes (e.g. noun, verb, adjective). The syntactic and semantic representations of LVCs that make up the foundation of my analysis that are presented in this paper are done within the HPSG and MRS formalisms. I then implemented this analysis in the Grammar Matrix customization system, using illustrative and pseudo languages to do so (including Bardi, English, Japanese, and Persion). I also evaluated the library using held-out languages (Ch’ol, Daasanach, and Korafe-Yegha) in order to test its generalizability across different languages. The results of this evaluation include an average of ∼90% coverage, ∼25% overgeneration, and ∼2.0 ambiguity across the testsuites for all three held-out languages.