Comments on: A zero-tolerance approach to PP attachment

By: chris

chris — Sat, 29 Mar 2014 01:22:28 +0000

Am I the only one who at first read "a victim of sexual abuse and a senior cardinal" as referring to a single person? I thought it was ambiguous in that regard. My first reaction to myl's question about why we don't misconstrue "Pope Francis on Saturday appointed" was that the semantic elements were determinative: I know extrinsically that papacy is generally not a day-long condition, and more precisely that Pope Francis is a specific individual whose identity does not change depending on the day. Yeah, I agree with this too. Because the reader's understanding of the semantics informs how they interpret the syntax, computer parsers won't achieve parity with human parsers until they *understand* the sentences in addition to analyzing them.

By: Kyle Gorman

Kyle Gorman — Fri, 28 Mar 2014 22:01:25 +0000

I just ran the sentence in question through the BUBS parser (which is comparable to the Berkeley parser but includes more pruning of grammar and search space) and a WSJ-based grammar. While the "to a new group..." PP is still attached too low, and the Pope is still just Pope for a day, it does correctly conjoin "a victim of sexual abuse" and "a senior cardinal".

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 28 Mar 2014 10:34:25 +0000

Am I the only one who at first read "a victim of sexual abuse and a senior cardinal" as referring to a single person? As in 'Pope Francis appointed a cardinal who was also a victim of sexual abuse'. [English is not my native language.]

By: Ted

Ted — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 22:04:52 +0000

Sorry, didn't quite finish that last thought. What I mean is that myl's analysis seems to be something like "we don't go down the garden path because utterances of the type WEEKDAY + VERB are statistically more likely than utterances of the type NOUN + WEEKDAY," rather than what I think is actually happening, which is that we don't go down the garden path because we know that a modifier that refers to a specific day is likely to provide useful information if it's modifying a non-continuous action like appointing, but not if it's modifying a perpetual status like being Pope Francis.

By: Ted

Ted — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 21:37:21 +0000

This makes me wonder about the extent to which an algorithm can successfully process this using purely grammatical knowledge. My first reaction to myl's question about why we don't misconstrue "Pope Francis on Saturday appointed" was that the semantic elements were determinative: I know extrinsically that papacy is generally not a day-long condition, and more precisely that Pope Francis is a specific individual whose identity does not change depending on the day. I therefore would have suggested that, when I hear "The Pope on Saturday" at the beginning of a sentence, the reason I don't parse "on Saturday" as modifying "the Pope" is because it's unlikely that such a precise temporal modifier would be necessary or helpful as a dependent modifier of the head noun "Pope" (and even less likely with the arthrous version, "the Pope"), given my knowledge that there's only one Pope at a time and the incumbent generally retains the title for life. Thus, hearing "on Saturday" and knowing that it's unlikely to modify "the Pope," I anticipate that it will be followed by something where the modifier "on Saturday" is likely to provide useful information, and sure enough, there's a preterit form of an verb denoting an instantaneous action, "appointed." There's no garden path, because the meaning of the words doesn't readily allow for ambiguous interpretations. A fortiori, this analysis applies to a sentence that begins "Pope Francis on Saturday," because it is impossible, given the meaning of "Pope Francis," for that phrase to be modified in any useful way by "on Saturday." I find in interesting, therefore, that myl's analysis seems to be based on Saturday being classifiable as WEEKDAY -- which I take to mean something like

Saturday ∈ {Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday}

rather than a human parser's analysis (mine, anyway), which I think is more like

"On Saturday" only makes sense if it's modifying something where the specific day on which something occurs (or some state of affairs exists) is relevant, and that condition is not met with respect to "Pope Francis."

By: exackerly

exackerly — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 20:12:48 +0000

@Vasha, in my 8th-grade journalism class I was taught that the opening paragraph tells Who, What, Where, Why, and When, but you never lead with When.

By: V

Thu, 27 Mar 2014 15:57:21 +0000

Dan: I'm not a linguist and I parsed it the same way.

By: Ellen K.

Ellen K. — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 14:10:14 +0000

I only got as far as "a new group" before being able to get the right parsing, though that was due to careful reading because of familiarity with, and interest in, the issue as well as due to reading it here, on Language Log. Knowing there's something of linguistic interest in a passage does change how I read it.

By: Vasha

Vasha — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 12:59:52 +0000

No, the weekday-second ordering really is unnatural to (this) American speaker. Presumably journalists don't put it ahead of the sentence because they want the first, eye-catching words to be the much-more-significant agent, and the position after the verb may be hindered by all the other complex sentence elements there.

By: Robert Kenney

Robert Kenney — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 12:40:32 +0000

I had no problem reading this as intended by the writer, probably because there was no immediate prepositional phrase following "appointed a victim of sexual abuse…" It comes only after the mention of the cardinal.

By: RP

RP — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 08:35:09 +0000

@dainichi,
To me, too, it sounds very unnatural to have the weekday in second position – but I'm a BrE speaker, and I see the weekday-second pattern a lot in US journalism, so it could be a BrE/AmE difference.

By: Chris Waters

Chris Waters — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 04:47:50 +0000

I think part of the reason it's so garden-pathy is that "approach to" is such a common phrase. While I'm not a linguist, I have worked on NLP software (for a largish Internet Search company*), and that's exactly the kind of cue that can really help the parser. Thus, even though in this case, it would actually lead to an incorrect parsing, I'd actually be pleased and impressed if the computer misinterpreted this for the right reasons! *One whose mascot was from Wodehouse.

By: dainichi

dainichi — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 04:43:30 +0000

Maybe the parsers got number 1 wrong because they, like me, thought that "On WEEKDAY, NP VERBed" or "NP VERBed on WEEKDAY" sound good, but "NP on WEEKDAY VERBed" sounds unnatural.