Three ways to argue over arguments
UPDATE: Contribute information on how your language identifies its arguments here.
When we execute a command in Ubiquity, in very simple terms, we’re hoping to do something (a verb) to some arguments (the nouns). Every sentence in every language uses some method to encode which arguments correspond to which roles of the verb. Here are a couple examples:
1 2 | He sees Mary. 彼が Maryを 見る。 (Kare-ga Mary-o miru.) |
As speakers of English, you can read sentence (1) above and know exactly who is doing the seeing and who is being seen and speakers of Japanese can get the same information from (2). How do different languages code for arguments in different roles? There are, broadly speaking, three different ways:
We’ll take a brief look today at these three different strategies, all of which a localizeable natural language interface will surely encounter.
Word order
In many languages, the position of the arguments relative to one another and to the verb determine the roles which each argument will play. Mandarin Chinese is a good example of such a language:
3 4 | 他 喜欢 Mary (Ta xihuan Mary) Mary 喜欢 他 (Mary xihuan ta) |
Here, sentence (3) says “he likes Mary” while sentence (4) says “Mary likes him”. Simply reversing the positions of “he/him” and “Mary” we’re able to flip the roles that they fill in the sentence: that of the person who does the liking and the person who is being liked. Now take a look at sentence (5) which means “John says ‘hello’ to Mary.”
5 | John 告诉 Mary "你 好" (John gaosu Mary "ni hao") |
We note here that, while in English we used a different strategy of marking one argument (we marked the “hello” argument with “to”), Chinese doesn’t mark either of the arguments. There is, however, a clearly defined order to the arguments, which you might encode this way:
say [who you're speaking to] [what you're saying]
If you swap the order of the two objects in this sentence, it becomes ungrammatical. (Note: the asterisk * here means the sentence is ungrammatical.)
5 | * John 告诉 "你 好" Mary (John gaosu "ni hao" Mary) |
Here, the word order dictates that “你好” must be “who you’re speaking to” and “Mary” must be “what you’re saying,” but that doesn’t make sense, so the sentence is ungrammatical.
Marking the arguments
Another possible strategy is to mark each argument (or some of the arguments) so that each argument’s role is clear. In many languages this is done with case marking. Take for example this Ancient Greek sentence with its English gloss on line (6). Here, NOM refers to nominative case and ACC refers to accusative case.1
5 6 | ho didaskal-os paideuei to paidi-on (SVO) the teacher -NOM teaches the boy -ACC |
This sentence means “the teacher instructs the boy.” While sentence (5) is in Subject-Verb-Object order, any of the six possible orderings of {subject, verb, object} are also grammatical and mean the same thing:2
7 8 9 10 11 | ho didaskalos to paidion paideuei (SOV) paideuei ho didaskalos to paidion (VSO) paideuei to paidion ho didaskalos (VOS) to paidion ho didaskalos paideuei (OSV) to paidion paideuei ho didaskalos (OVS) |
Many languages also use adpositions (prepositions and/or postpositions) to further clarify the role of an argument in addition to case (like English does) or in lieu of case marking altogether. The idea is the same, though: you want to clarify the roles of the arguments so you morphologically mark the arguments with their roles.
Marking the verb
Many languages mark the verb with some information about the argument in a certain role, so that we can properly identify the argument’s roles. This kind of phenomenon is called agreement.
The most common type of verbal agreement is subject agreement, where the verb is marked by a specific form depending on some features of the subject. Anyone who’s taken French 101 will recognize this verb conjugation paradigm:
| subject | être (to be) | |
|---|---|---|
| singular | je (I) | suis |
| tu (you) | es | |
| il/elle (he/she) | est | |
| plural | nous (we) | sommes |
| vous (plural you) | êtes | |
| ils (they) | sont |
With this paradigm, if you hear or see “suis” in a French sentence, you immediately know that “je” (I) must be the subject and if you see “sommes,” “nous” (we) is the subject, etc. Standard Average European languages tend to exhibit this sort of subject-verb agreement.
Features of the subject position aren’t the only thing that can be marked on the verb, though. Hungarian, for example, has a type of object agreement. Specifically, the verb marks whether the object is definite or not (in linguistics lingo, “the verb agrees with the object’s definiteness feature”).
12 13 14 15 | John lát egy almát. John sees an apple John látja az almát. John sees the apple |
Notice that in sentence (12) (glossed in (13)) the verb for “see” is realized as “lát,” while in (14) it’s “látja.” A speaker can use that agreement to see whether the object is definite or not and thus limit the possible object arguments out of all the nouns in the sentence.
All of the above
Most languages do not use only one of these strategies, but a combination of them. English is a very good example. In a sentence like (12) below the main coding of grammatical roles seems to be word order alone. By reversing the word order into (13), we can effectively swap the argument’s roles.
12 13 | John likes Mary. Mary likes John. |
However, this doesn’t work with pronominal arguments. Swapping the arguments in (14) yields (15) which is ungrammatical due to the case marking on the pronouns.
14 15 | He likes her. * Her likes he. |
In addition, the verb in English must agree with the subject’s number (singular or plural):
16 17 18 | John likes them. * They likes John. They like John. |
In this way, English exhibits all three strategies: word order, case marking, and agreement, although often only word order is actively used to disambiguate the roles of arguments.
Question: What strategies are used by your language to mark the roles of different arguments?
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The following example is from Holger Diessel. ↩
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“Mean the same thing” here means that the teacher is always instructing and the boy is always being instructed. The sentences may differ in when or how they are used depending on which argument is being talked about or what the implications of the utterance are. The formal notion is truth-conditional equivalence. ↩
Related posts:
- Contribute: how your language identifies its arguments
- Writing commands with semantic roles
- Ubiquity in Firefox: Focus on Japanese
- Adding Your Language to Ubiquity Parser 2
- Rolling out the Roles
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Tags: agreement, ambiguity, Ancient Greek, argument structure, arguments, case, Chinese, coding properties, English, grammatical relations, Hungarian, Japanese language, linguistics, Mandarin, Mozilla Planet, ubiquity, verbs, word order
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February 18th, 2009 at 3:59 am
Wow, this brings back memories of the linguistics and Latin courses I did at university.
February 18th, 2009 at 4:13 am
That's the idea! ^^
February 18th, 2009 at 9:49 am
[…] blog blog « Three ways to argue over arguments […]
February 18th, 2009 at 9:53 am
Ok… after revisiting my knowledge about Latin and Ancient Greek, I look forward to reading your next post about consecutio temporum or the verbal tense aoristo.
Maybe it would be interesting comparing those strategies with the programming languages ones. It seems to me they use a word order strategy (the syntax) and an adposition technique using punctuations.
Grabbing the idea, Ubiquity linguistic interface might use a semi-natural language approach, mixing different strategies between natural and programming languages. I think the main point is building an interface with a strong inner coherence - same strategies for same use cases.
Again the kind of coherence (what strategies using) might be customized by the user.
February 18th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Mitcho, great post. I feel my brain is a bit bigger; and the free space a bit smaller.
February 20th, 2009 at 11:19 am
[…] of prepositions, direct objects come before verbs, and adjectives precede nouns. In terms of how it identifies its arguments, every argument has a postposition/case marker (called a particle in the Japanese literature) which […]
February 21st, 2009 at 7:05 pm
[…] mitcho > blog > Three ways to argue over arguments […]
March 3rd, 2009 at 9:06 pm
Nice post! I feel like I should recommend it to my linguistics lecturers.
I added N on verbal marking and Y on argument marking for Norwegian in your Google Doc. Norwegian has no verbal agreement; compared to English the only difference in case marking in most dialects is that we still have "thou vs thee" (but there are enough prepositions). Swedish and Danish are fairly similar. Georgian, which I'm reading about now, has fairly "free" word order, a whole lot of verbal agreement (including a little bit of object agreement) and a bunch of cases..
March 23rd, 2009 at 10:24 am
[…] to these surveys would be used to identify certain salient features of the language, such as how the language codes for its arguments (for example using adpositions, case marking, or word order), whether the commands tend to be […]
April 15th, 2009 at 6:19 am
[…] attachment ambiguity was possible because there was no clear marker on “April 15th,” which may have disambiguated it as “on April 15th”. In […]
May 7th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
[…] ave multiple different strategies for accomplishing similar communicative tasks. One oft-used strategy for marking different roles of arguments is the use of adpositions (a fancy term for prepositions and postpositions). Unlike case-markers which oft […]
July 8th, 2009 at 9:58 am
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October 14th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
All these 3 ways over argumentation are very interesting and specific.