Next, Incorporate the Flour: A Recipe for Modeling Noun Incorporation in the LinGO Grammar Matrix

Abstract

This thesis describes the creation of a new library for modeling noun incorporation (NI) in the LinGO Grammar Matrix customization system. NI is the morphological attestation of a noun on a verb stem where the noun bears some semantic relation to the verb. Languages vary with respect to how NI functions. In some languages, incorporating verbs pattern like intransitives whereas in others, they pattern like transitives. Some languages allow other arguments to be promoted to the argument position vacated by the incorporated noun (IN). Some allow external elements to modify the IN. I present an analysis of the variation of NI within the syntactic framework of HPSG and semantic framework of MRS. I also describe how I implemented this analysis into the Grammar Matrix customization system to be used by user-linguists hoping to model NI in an implemented grammar. I evaluate my system on five illustrative languages (Chukchi [ckt], Southern Tiwa [tix], Mapudungun [arn], Mohawk [moh], and Tongan [ton]), a set of constructed pseudo-languages, and five held-out languages (Apurinã [apu], Bribri [bzd], Inuktitut [iku], Moloko [mlw], and Yaqui [yaq]) The results show that my library effectively generalizes to unseen data with an average of 95.6% coverage, 15.2% overgeneration, and an ambiguity of 1.7 parses per grammatical sentence averaged across each grammar.