Papers by Tzvetomira Venkova
Езиков свят - Orbis Linguarum, 2019
Ezikov Svyat volume 20 issue 1, 2022
The paper discusses how Yordan Penčev, the pioneer of the Bulgarian generative syntax, bridged th... more The paper discusses how Yordan Penčev, the pioneer of the Bulgarian generative syntax, bridged the ideas of Alexander Teodorov-Balan’s native formal school with those of Noam Chomsky’s – the representative of the American generative-transformational grammar. Penčev established such connections in his first publications ever (1953, 1958), thus strengthening the thread of the Bulgarian syntactic formalism, despite the obstructions of the totalitarian period. The text focuses on the core of Balan’s ideas, as commented by Penčev in his first two publications, such as distinction between lexical notion and syntactic meaning, case as a semantic category, classification of pronouns based on syntactic criteria, and positing a prepositional phrase as a full-fledged member of the constituent structure. Further on, the paper compares the ideas commented by Penčev in those early publications with the corresponding ones in the early Chomsky’s works (1957), whereby strong similarity is shown. Fin...
Situations in which conflicting constraints clash can potentially provide linguists with insights... more Situations in which conflicting constraints clash can potentially provide linguists with insights into the architecture of grammar. This paper deals with such a case. When predicative modifiers of morphologically rich languages head relative clauses, they are involved in two, sometimes conflicting, agreement relationships. Different languages adopt different strategies in order to resolve situations of conflicting constraints. This paper focuses on Standard Arabic and the hybrid agreement strategy which it employs. It argues that the HPSG theory of agreement, which distinguishes between morphosyntactic and semantic agreement, constitutes an appropriate framework for accounting for the phenomenon. In addition, it shows that contrary to claims made by Doron and Reintges (2005), a non-derivational framework such as HPSG is adequate for accounting for this non-trivial agreement pattern. Moreover, with a constructional approach, whereby constraints can target syntactic structures above the lexical level, better empirical coverage is achieved.
Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, 2006
This paper proposes a projectionist account of the unexpressed object alternations in HPSG. The a... more This paper proposes a projectionist account of the unexpressed object alternations in HPSG. The approach is based on the two-level mapping mechanism, developed in Manning and Sag (1998) and Sag et al (2003). The proposed analysis keeps identical argument structure values in the lexeme description of both valence alternatives, while different surface valence values are related by a lexical rule. The HPSG model is applied cross-linguistically to English and Bulgarian. Some Bulgarian-specific traits, such as the limited alternation range and the grammaticalized aspect, related to the formal characteristics of the unexpressed object alternations, are discussed and interpreted within HPSG.
Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2019
Slavia Meridionalis, 2018
Chomskyan revolution in Bulgarian socio-cultural and linguistic environment The term Chomskyan re... more Chomskyan revolution in Bulgarian socio-cultural and linguistic environment The term Chomskyan revolution, referring to the innovative current in modern American linguistics and Noam Chomsky as it’s leading figure, permeated the metaphorical imagery of the popular linguistic and socio-cultural spheres in the USA. This term actually surpassed specialized linguistic circles, where it designated Chomsky’s transformational-generative grammar model and normally appeared in quotation marks. However, although Chomskyan revolution came to occupy a central position in the American network of unquestioned cultural mythologemes, its Bulgarian reception was different. The overall impression in Bulgarian linguistic and socio-cultural circles regarding the revolutionary leap has been rather skeptical and reserved, although the Chomskyan grammar model itself has been introduced into research practice. Such a difference in attitudes towards the status of transformational-generative grammar in the s...
… of the First Workshop on Treebanks …, 2002
INTRODUCTION 1 The paper discusses a model for processing Bulgarian compound da-conjunctions, bui... more INTRODUCTION 1 The paper discusses a model for processing Bulgarian compound da-conjunctions, built on the principles of finite-state techniques, namely local grammars. This model is intended for implementation as a pre-processor for a deep analyser because of its potentials to solve some basic problems of NLP thus providing the input of the deep analyser with linguistic information which can be crucial for the efficiency of the analysing procedure. The outcome of the pre-processor can concern the following aspects of the work of the deep analyser: unambiguous treatment of the lexical semantics of a number of compound lexemes; correct marking of clause boundaries of some adjunct clauses; determining the semantic type of adjunct clauses according to the conjunctions, disambiguated by the pre-processor; greater precision in the identification of prepositional phrases due to the preceding disambiguation of some very frequent prepositions. The choice of th
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Papers by Tzvetomira Venkova