next up previous
Next: Izone and Ozone Up: German verb clustering without Previous: German verb clustering without

The Directionality Constraint

We have reduced the amount of phrase structure to a minimum. Therefore we must rely on word order constraints to ensure that all and only grammatical word orders are derivable. The treatment of word-order starts out with the directionality constraint. Heads may specify for a given complement whether it has to precede or follow the head. For this purpose, a feature DIR is introduced, with ` $ \leftarrow$' and ` $ \rightarrow$' as possible values. The interpretation of this feature is given by the following word order constraint:

\enumsentence{ {\bf Directionality Constraint:} All elements left of the head ha... ...~~$<$\ ~~ \begin{displaymath}dir & $\leftarrow$\ \end{displaymath} \end{avm}}}

The position of a complement with respect to its head can now be specified lexically, by simply adding the appropriate specifications on the COMPS-list of the head. Thus, the lexical entry for e.g. `wollen' is extended as follows:

\enumsentence{ \begin{avm} {\rm wollen} ({\em to want}) $\mapsto$ \begin{displa... ...1\\ dir & $\rightarrow$\ \end{displaymath}} \> \end{displaymath}\end{avm}}


Noord G.J.M. van
1998-09-29