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A Computational Study of Transitivity

Tanmoy Bhattacharya, University of Hyderabad, 1996

The central issue that the dissertation addresses is: In what form is language available to the language user? One of the claims is that: clauses stage events (or actions) like a camera staging a film/ frame. The utterance/ understanding of a sentence is a spectacle. A major part of the thesis, therefore, is concerned with the presentational aspect of a clause.

Another aspect is the connection that a language user makes with the staged spectacle. We capture this through the notions of accommodation and field which constitutes a modified DRT. This is the formal tool that is used to capture this connection. The main tension of the thesis is of using a particular formal method to capture concepts that lie beyond the boundaries of the formalism.The answer to the question: How does the user get a grip on the presented clause? has been the major thread of discovery in this dissertation - the notion of salience. We claim that salience is a general cognitive apparatus through which the user computes the clause and thus gets a grip on it. We capture salience of clause through various asymmetries that are part and parcel of a clause - like topic/ focus, AGRs/ AGRo, etc. Our claims are the following in this regard: (i) asymmetries can be subsumed under a general notion of a new versus given opposition (ii) asymmetries are reflected at each level of abstraction

Transitivity is the clearest of the asymmetries which represents the cognitive/ perceptive notion of salience. Psycholinguistic evidence show that for a child, the basic conceptual structure is that 'persons perform actions and things are affected by actions'. We read this as transitivity. We construct a syntactic account of transitivity where certain syntactic configurations and operations reflect extra-sentential notions like staging, scening, and event. Regarding (ii) above, a slow reading of the dissertation displays a general narrowing down of the scope from discourse structure to clausal structure to phrasal structure (chapters 1-4).

Among the topics dealt with are the given/new distinction, syntactic agreement, ergatives, transitives and unaccusatives, the Split-VP hypothesis, the Obligatory Case Parameter, the three-layered Case Theory and Principle-Based Parsing.


next up previous
Next: Complement Clauses in Hindi Up: Dissertation Abstracts Previous: Dissertation Abstracts

Rajesh Bhatt
Mon Mar 30 11:24:59 EST 1998