About Mary as it comes together to wish her well as she heads into retirement?
Well, there's a lot to say. I promise to keep this brief. I'm not the only person who's going to be speaking.
And so I'm going to offer a few personal reflections. I don't if she realises this, but I have to admit to being rather starstruck.
The first time that I met Mary LFG conference because that 2001 book kind of left, you'd been a constant reference during my masters in these studies.
So I was a little bit tongue tied, but I think I got over it.
But my abiding memory of interactions with Mary at that meeting and subsequent meetings at conferences over the years while I was the post student,
was of how genuinely curious she was about what I was doing, my research.
I remember her particularly very early on after I'd just met her spending an extended meal time with me at a conference talking through the analysis.
I was preparing for my PhD thesis and how what mattered most to Mary was that
she understood the data as she understood the analysis and how it worked,
understood its significance and understood what I was trying to achieve. And to me, that really typifies Mary's approach and outlook.
So for every inquisitive about language and the significance of the data, but also deeply interested in what another researcher is trying to achieve,
no matter how much experience they may or may not have had at that point in academia,
and truly generous in terms of how much time she's willing to spend not only learning about your research,
but also very gently challenging your assumptions and analysis in such a way that you'd always be the better for having had that chat with Mary.
It's an experience that I feel very fortunate to have had on many,
many occasions from being a Ph.D. student to having her as a mentor while I was a postdoc through to being her colleague in the faculty to date.
And of course, I've seen a mentor, many, many others in the same way.
I'm not sure how Mary would feel about being regarded as a role model,
but it's one of those things that you don't necessarily have much of a say in yourself.
So as we take this opportunity to say goodbye and wish her well,
I'd like to say a personal and a professional thank you to Mary for her generosity of time and spirit,
for her inquisitiveness, for her rigour, and for showing the way to me and many, many others throughout her career.
Oh, thank you very much, Louise. That's her.
Well, it's you know, even if you clap, you're going to hear you just hear it.
And, um, but yes, I'm going to pass.
That is Jamie. Ah, there you are. Yeah, I'm here. Yeah. Hello.
Well, what I have to say has a remarkable parallelism with the Louise that it's clearly a common thread going here.
But um. Yeah, I mean, it's a very, very big Goffer term, but it's a pleasure to be invited back,
especially because Mary has had such an important role in my academic career.
I realised, looking back the other day that I was in her prelims grammatical analysis class that I researched for FHA syntax,
that she supervised my master's thesis, she supervised my thesis, and then she was a mentor and a colleague when I started teaching as well.
So really, she's been there the whole time. So, um, yeah, I'm very happy, very privileged to be able to see, uh, to do say some words now about her.
Um, and really I want to because I think my role he really is as the representative of former students.
So I wanted to say a few things, um, three things about Mary that I think have helped us as students.
And I know that many of us sort of strive to emulate in that role model thing,
emulate in our own professional work for the first as much as the with a boundless enthusiasm for for other peoples,
for their of the students were great for ideas.
I think it's very hard when you start out as an undergrad or a master's student trying to propose your own questions and your own thoughts,
thinking that anything you have to say is original. Um, and Mary is very good at helping you find where it can be and show you how it can be.
And, you know, that's not to say that it's everything is wonderful and there's no criticism.
There's sometimes quite a crushing criticism when you realise you've missed something fundamental but that you
are excited to improve because you can tell that Mary is excited to see the projects develop and to improve.
And I think that's a huge bonus for students, really. Um, the second thing is, is generosity, generosity of spirit.
I was going to be generous of your time also works, um, because I think, you know,
it's clear to all of us who've been supervised by Mary that she's she cares very deeply about our well-being as well as our academic progress.
And that can be as simple as kind of day to day work life balance stuff.
But also I think it goes, you know, to sort of professional development and helping point out job opportunities,
career development stuff and being very generous with her contacts and with the network and putting you in touch with people.
And again, that makes a huge difference when you're starting out. So that's a really important thing that, you know, I think we should do so.
But the third thing really is what I think of the two stem from, which is a remarkable humility,
um, because I think Mary is an incredibly accomplished academic with a very successful career.
And yet in a world and academic world that is so full of very big egos, she has managed to remain very humble.
And it's I think that's what makes a good supervisor in any field, really is the, uh,
not just in academia, but measuring your success by the success of those under you.
And I think that's something that Mary does exceptionally well.
And so it's heartening and encouraging to see that, you know, you can achieve so much and still remain so, you know, kind of open and genuine.
And that's been a real inspiration. And I think Louise is right to say that that's been a role model for many of us.
So I will, uh, stop talking briefly.
But I just want to say on behalf of myself and as a self-appointed or at least appointed representative of former students,
um, I wanted to say a really very hearty thank you, Mary, for everything you've done and everything you continue to do.
Let's be honest, um, for all of us, even when we are long gone. Um, so.
Yeah. And I hope you will enjoy a very well earned and prosperous retirement.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jamie.
Uh, I'm now going to move from students to to colleagues as Steve well,
Jeremy and Louise have said quite a lot of the things that I wanted to say with which of course,
I agree and I have one advantage, which is that I've known Mary for a lot longer than they have.
And in fact, I embarrassed both by saying that I think Mary and I first met in the eighties when we were both working at Nasseri International,
which was a research unit spun out of Stanford University.
And we had a shared interest then and in the application of this strange algorithm called
higher order unification to in Mary's case with Fernando Stuart and a Lipsitz and in my case,
applications to to focus. So we had we had that in common.
Mary subtlely left Asara International. But she went to a park where she worked with several people, one of whom is present today,
Ron and Martin Kay, who were sort of old friends of mine by that time on the island, but not them.
And we came across each other a number of times then,
particularly when one of my students to Crouch went to work at a park and worked with Ron and Mary on a variety of of semantic and logical efforts.
We also came across each other quite a number of times. And Ron to on an EU project called Fracas, which I was involved in,
along with Robin Cooper and Stanley Peters and a young guy like I remember a number of meetings since they were in Germany.
They probably involved lots of food and quite a lot of beer and the Black Forest and various other kind of nice watering holes.
We eventually I was in linguistics and in Oxford from about 2000 to 2006.
And during that time I think we had a couple of girls are getting married there and finally got it.
And unfortunately, I jumped ship of shortly afterwards to go back to computer science while we were colleagues.
I was enormously impressed by her kind of Catholic tastes and linguistics, not necessarily in linguistics areas,
but in the kinds of linguistic phenomena that she was interested in and the range of languages and the way that she was able to
connect with students from far flung parts of the world and get them to download their knowledge of their exotic languages so that,
you know, all of these things could be coded.
And as a colleague, she was just incredibly supportive and also makes me very even tempered, which is a great virtue.
As Jamie said, you know, many there are many egos and linguistics and we've had a few of them in Oxford, funnily enough.
But anyway, Mary, it's been great working with you, and I'm sure you won't be really retiring,
but I hope you'll manage to take it easy and enjoy not being in the Clarens and walking down little Clarendon Street in the morning.
I think she's going to be retiring entirely.
Is that grounds to look after her? And therefore, we are keeping her for a while.
And I'm going to hand this over. And we decided, you know, she has to be some outside Oxford as well.
This would be just runners here, too. But we have nice Vincent with us as well.
OK, this was what I predicted.
Basically, I get used to it by being at the end of the alphabet anyway.
But when I was at the bottom of the list, I thought, I know what's going to happen.
Everybody will have said everything that I would want to say.
And all I even made a little list of of key words that included included things like generosity of spirit, breath, openness, a range of things.
And then everybody goes unmentioned.
I guess the sort of to context in which I know Mary, that are sort of between the the the Oxford based Student one and Steeves,
which goes back to before the time when I first knew Mary, which was when the LFG meeting started in the in the 1990s.
And so it's been at those. Annual meetings that I've met her and learnt to admire exactly her range of interest from morphology,
formal semantic syntactic structure, pragmatic structure, and also at the same time exactly as other people have said,
the range of languages and particularly the work that's been done on on on Austronesian
languages and the big project on differential object marking with with Irina Nikolayevich.
So all those skills, abilities and exactly her one word that people haven't used that I have on my list here is the niceness.
She's just playing really nice person that if you want to go and ask her a question, however dumb,
however ignorant, you still get a tolerant, understanding, coherent kind of answer.
So exactly. And that is, as others have indicated, this isn't a quality that one always finds in our professional world.
I guess the other context in which I've worked with her and known her is in work at the British Academy.
And there she's an absolute example. We have a lot of work to do there in terms of evaluating project assessment and committee work.
And you can guarantee if somebody hands out a bunch of post-doctoral projects to be evaluated or small grants to be evaluated,
Mary's evaluations come in almost before you even started reading the email about what you ought to do.
So in every respect, just a wonderful human being, a very, very fine scholar,
and certainly somebody that shouldn't go off the intellectual horizon just because of this technical thing called retirement.
So I wish you well, but I will agree with you entirely.
And if I said if you were in the gardens of some college, I would have said, you know, who else would like to speak?
But if this is not the medium to do that. So I'm going to have a we have a small other plan over here.
Good to ask Ken if he could sort of barge in if possible.
Let's see if this barging in is going to happen. Is he coming in and.
Oh, yes. Yes. Good, excellent. Look, there's one more.
I got it. OK, I got a reaction from.
Very good. That is a cod, believe it or not.
This is a card. That is a card. But the box, it's open the card.
I believe this is happening. This is unbelievable. Wow.
It's very hard. It's just it is it was the largest I could find.
It took some effort. Oh. Wow.
Wow, that's a lot of boxes, just perhaps can can help you open one to see what.
So I'm sure it's a contribution from the entire faculty and a small craft, but.
Wow. Well, it's very well wrapped.
Well, yes, I suppose they were afraid of it just so I.
The door. Yes, indeed. In Russia at least, you can't believe you organised it, required a bit of them.
Have plenty of time. Nothing to do, really. So one of the things I enjoy doing is because I am afraid we can't quite see the.
Oh yes. Now we can. Yeah, that is beautiful. Well, we were told that you like Japanese poetry.
Wow. And that suspension of two giant boxes of Japanese.
Yes. I have never seen that.
A loss for words. But here we are it. Wow.
Now I have to invite everybody over, you can come and eat. Exactly.
Yes. You know, the reason for this, of course, is looking the other way.
You don't have to open everything there. That's it's going to take some time, I think.
Yeah, I think so. Plates as well.
Yes. It has an entire set for you. Wow.
Wow. Thank you. That's so nice. It's so unexpected.
I have no idea. I thought we were going to have a nice talk from Rob.
I wish you wouldn't show up. I'm desperate.
Best to make sure that you could come. I even got married to try to persuade her to introduce run, but try to make sure that she was there.
But then she said she had a cough and I got really nervous and so.
OK, so I think you should move to run. Stop, which is also planned.
And time for you to say thank you, though, once it's completely unexpected.
Thank you. This is amazing. And it's so nice to see people that I haven't seen in such a long time to thank you.
And teams that allow us to see more people, but they have sent messages and I'm sure they will send you more messages after this.
I'm going to I'm not going to introduce Ron. I'm going to pass this on to was done who's in charge of run and then I'll take over at the end.
Thank you. I'll do it. As someone who always struggles to do at most one thing semi competently,
I'm in awe when I see Ron Kaplansky, which has so many points on it that it's quite intimidating.
So of course we know him as a distinguished LFG person, in fact, as one of the people who designed it and implemented the computational side of it.
But when you look at your CV,
you can see he actually has a B.A. in mathematics and language behaviour from Berkeley and he did his Ph.D. in Harvard in social psychology.
He was vice president at Amazon and he is a distinguished scientist at Nuance Communications.
The list goes on and on and on. And I'm not going to bore you with it,
but I just wanted to say how deeply impressive it is to see so many achievements besides the outstanding linguistic achievements.
And so we are extremely pleased to have you here on to give a talk to us.
Thank you very much for agreeing.
Well, thank you for inviting me and inviting you to participate in this celebration of Mary's career and achievements.
I think I I knew Mary from the other side.
She was a student and then became a friend, close friend and colleague and collaborator.
Over maybe thirty five years. Maybe Steve and I can have an arm wrestle about who first started working with her first.
But we go back a long time and it's been incredibly productive interaction and collaboration for me, certainly, and I hope for Mary as well.
So I'm very pleased to be able to participate in this over the years, I think in some circles,
but I think, again, Nigel mentioned the alphabetical sequencing problem.
I think D comes before K I think in some circles, which is something known as Dalrymple at all.
So it's been a long and really productive collaboration, so let's see, we did a dry run.
Yeah, we did. So let's hope it works out. Let's let's see if if I click on the Magic Square.
And then I see things on my desktop someplace, it's quick.
Here. You see?
Yes, I mean, the thing we don't want to see to people's.
Incidents where there are. So this is our yes, you're seeing it now, thanks to make it the yeah.
And now can everybody. See my screen?
Yes, we can. So one of the things that, again, going back to.
Mary and her qualities and her attitude towards things is she has this really rare, I think, combination of.
Very, very careful attention to formal detail and the significance of formal properties and formal implications and at the same time a very,
very deep and abiding interest in linguistic data and how linguistic data interacts with the formalism.
And that's been very important for me, because as many of you know, and as in the introduction you saw, I'm actually not a data person.
I'm actually as a social psychologist, not really a linguist.
I'm sort of like passing as a linguist.
But for me, it's just very, very important to work with them, to have worked with Mary and to work with John and other people who really,
really are very, very good at the linguistic side of it and its relation to the formal issues.
And so for me, that's been the source of a lot of productivity for me all through the years.
So in this talk, formal aspects of underspecified features, I tried to find a talk that because I know that.
A certain proportion of the audience is probably familiar with LFG and the technical issues and so forth,
but I know this is more general audience and that not everybody has had the
exposure but of the theory and the formalism of the issues that that brings up.
So I thought that underspecified features was something that's common to a lot of issues, a lot of different approaches to language.
And so I thought I would talk about that with but in the context of LFG and LFG formal.
Notions that make it possible to tease out the different aspects of underspecified features.
So in that context, we talk about different kinds of underspecified specification.
It's not just a monolithic, single kind of notion.
And I've kind of broken it out into what I'm calling just simply unspecified values, constrained values,
unmarked values, default values and indeterminate values, different ways of underspecified, linguistic features.
And the formal considerations in each case are what is the linguistic notion or intuition that that is being expressed?
How is that written down in a grammar or in rules of some sort and some sort of specification?
What are the linguistic representations that then encode of that notion of under specification?
And then the final question I'm not going to say too much about is if it's underspecified.
How does that get interpreted? How does the underlying significance of the specification propagate through syntax?
So it relates to other dependencies and also into other modules of linguistics, semantics, for example, where discourse, whatever,
and even to other computational applications, translation, search and others conversation,
something that I've been actually thinking about the last couple of years.
So that's the background or the setup for the talk.
I think given that some part of the audience may not be too familiar with LFG, I'm going to go through a crash course,
I hope for about ten minutes to explain what the fundamental formal concepts are and
then just kind of appeal to those to explain these different kinds of specification.
So in LFG, the starting point is structures that represent syntactic properties, and so we have what we call the constituent structure,
the C structure, which is just the formal encoding of surface water and grouping and basically a traditional frame structure tree.
But we also have. A separate structure, a structure, a very different formal type we call the functional structure,
and that's a formal encoding of syntactic functions like subject and features like no singular or case, nominative, tense, present and so forth.
So that's the the the basic fundamental linguistic representations that we assume in this syntactic theory.
So where do these structures come from?
How are they assigned to utterances? Well, the constituent structure is pretty traditional.
We basically have noted disability conditions that are provided by context, free rewriting rules of traditional sort.
And so chemistry can dominate empty because there's a rule that says that US can dominate AMPTP.
And in fact, this little tree satisfies all the nodes, satisfy the mothers and daughters,
satisfy this description, including the lexical categories and so forth.
Functional structure is a little bit different. Again, it's an attribute value structure,
but it's described by a set of equations and actually the quantified free theory of equality in the simple case.
And so we got a set of equations that say, for example, that there's some F structure called F one,
whose subject is an F structure that we're going to call F two.
And if we look over here, we see that for this structure, if we call this part F one and we call this part of two,
and in fact, F one has a subject which is labelled F to the F structure.
Here is basically a model for this set of equations.
Which we call the functional description or the description.
So, again, an LFG, there's this clear separation between the structures and the descriptions of those structures.
So the question is, how do you get that set of equations and LFG we have this notion of code description where we add annotations
to the constituent structure rules and we use those annotations to produce the description of the structure,
and then we check to see what a given candidate that structure, whether it satisfies all of those parts of the description.
So the way we make that happen is we just simply assume that there's a correspondence and
we call it to between the individual nodes of of a given C structure and the structure,
the units of the structure that we're trying to describe and assign to this utterance.
And the structure rule annotations then described the structure corresponding to the nodes that that rule, that myth.
So this is the notation that we use. So we take this rule is to PvP and we have these little annotations with the up arrows and down arrows.
And the idea is that this rule says that the F structure for the mother of the ENPI is the house as a subject, the structure of the MP.
And in fact, when we built the correspondence function t onto this structure and we label the nodes and one and two and three,
we're getting at the sanitation over there that says three of them to this little piece of structure is the image of this note over here.
Under this particular Mappin. So that's kind of the setting and basically make one other move, we say, well,
we're going to replace we're going to assume that the up arrow stands for the fee of the mother node that matches a given group pattern.
Down Arrow stands for fee of the daughter node that it's attached to.
And in this little configuration here with that rule laid out for the NAACP, can we label the nodes so we can talk about them?
And under that correspondence, they're attached to the structure in that way.
And we simply replaced the up and down arrows by what they instantiate to.
And then because we don't need to keep track of this relationship anymore,
we simplify by just naming them F1, F2 and so forth, and we get a set of equations in that way.
And then the interpretation is that the rule admits an S over an MP VPI.
And the F unit F two that corresponds to the MP note is the nominative subject of.
The unit corresponding to the S.A. and the DP and the S.A. map to the same structure and that kind of
map in that equation up close down is basically the way that heads and cokeheads are annotated and.
So then we get a grammar fragment that just basically has these kinds of annotations propagated around and into the lexicon as well.
But they're always uniformly assigned an interpretation with respect to a particular tree.
So, again, the structure is a model of its equations.
What does that mean?
It means that we have structure to satisfy all the equations in this F description that we read out of the tree, given the limitations.
And so if we had an ungrammatical sentence like John likes, they.
Which is a pronoun is a nominative pronoun, and we add it to the description of the state of equations that we got from the structure,
the fact that they is in the object position and with all these efforts and so forth instantiated,
we can infer that F Seven's case is equal to accusative and F Seven's case is nominative.
And that is a conflict because nominative is not equal to Cusato by and the conflict
comes from the transitivity in the substitution of the axioms of equality.
So we have inconsistent equations and this description, therefore has no model.
And that's why we judge the sentence to be ungrammatical.
By the way, can people see the mouse when I move it? Does that show up?
And. No, no, I don't think it does.
OK, well, then then I'll be careful. Thank you.
OK, so we want to make one other assertion, namely that if Stretch is not only a model, but it's a minimal model.
So the structure has to satisfy all the equations. And we have a description, but it also has to be the case that no smaller structure satisfies them.
So if we took enough structure that we had before and we simply say, well,
that structure could also why not have tents past the certainly compatible with all of the equations that we have?
It's just extra information. Well, we can remove that piece of information and get a smaller structure, and that would still satisfy.
The equations, the description, so this structure with tense past is not minimal,
and therefore it is not the structure that the phrase structure grammar with the instantiated annotations.
Well. Produce a description of and so this is not the structure of this sentence.
Now, I just mentioned that this notion of a minimal model analogy is equivalent to the notion of fully licence that you see in construction grammar.
And it's just whether you're thinking of it from the point of view of the description or the point of view of the structure.
But basically unrequited extensions in LFG would be unlicenced in construction grammar.
So these linguistic intuitions that we're talking about, I think are not just local to LFG, but in fact are shared across different theories.
So you can say one other thing, which about the description, which we allow destruction.
And when you have destruction in the equations,
you get a set of alternative description descriptions because we basically convert this to a disjunctive, normal form.
And each of those descriptions then must be a model where we test it to see if it is a model, if it is consistent and if it has a minimal model,
and sometimes we get more than one satisfied, viable alternative description, in which case we get multiple models.
And in that case, we recognise that the sentence is ambiguous.
And so this is a classic ambiguity that chicken is ready to eat, whether or not the chicken is hungry or the chicken's cooked and ready.
And its lexical entry would have a disjunction, saying that its subject controls the subject of the compliment,
where the subject controls the object of the compliment.
And that would give us the two different descriptions, one of which we have this five XCOM subject, the other we have had five XCOM object.
And from that we get the two different models, one in which chicken is both the subject of the main clause and the subject.
Both a compliment and the other is the subject to the main clause and the object of the compliment,
and with the different constructions, pronouns are thrown in from the construction itself.
So the can we have models with structures?
We have models. We have structures.
We have descriptions. We have models. We have minimal models.
And we have destruction in this kind of architecture.
And this has been around actually since the late 70s.
So with some embellishments and a little bit more explication over the years
from what I've defined in and around nineteen seventy eight and one remark,
I think because that's a long time and linguistic theory years for something to be basically stable and basically still informative and useful and,
and actually the subject of a lot of exploration and a lot of linguistic description and analysis.
So that way I think it's been quite successful. So to summarise, we have the different types,
the different types of structures that have different types of descriptions that are related through this code,
description, idea,
this notion of a structural correspondence like the and we have structures that are models of the descriptions and in particular the minimal models.
Now, in doing this, we want to we worry about complexity and trade-offs and complexity as we're doing linguistic analysis.
So we worry about the trade offs between cluttering up the structures, complicating the descriptions and enriching the formalism.
And under specification itself is interesting because the goal of it is to reduce the clutter.
However, it's distributed so the explanations become more transparent,
and that's why this is from a conceptual point of view, an interesting thing to think about.
So, again, these are the varieties that I'm going to kind of go through and not in great detail,
but try to give you the intuitions and a little bit of a formal apparatus that goes along with those intuitions.
So unspecified values and this is the most uncluttered.
Kind of under specification,
and the notion is that any value is possible for a future and in the description no value is specified and in the F structure,
no attribute or value appears. And the syncretic fish and sheep in English are.
The trivial examples of this, where neither fish nor sheep are marked for no,
they're unspecified and the so the description would not say that number has any particular value.
And the structure that goes along with that description.
Knows that it's tough and knows that one is if one is accused of from the construction that they appear in in this sentence,
but there is no marking of no. So the fact that these two credit forms of.
Don't don't specify number is simply just.
Omitted the future just doesn't appear at all now that the game here is that we don't particularly want
to include either in the grammar rules or lexical entries or in the structures or in the descriptions,
values that are simply uninformative. Now, there's a distinctive alternative, obviously, and that's more cluttered.
So suppose we knew from some separate declaration a universal of grammar.
For example, the number could take on the value, singular and plural and voice, could take on the values, active and passive and so forth.
And to represent that this is these are Socratic forms, then syncretic forms, we would say, OK,
this is just a function that either the number of fish is singular or the number is plural and the same thing for cheap.
And when we do that and we multiply things out to these alternative descriptions and destructive normal form,
we basically get four different structures that correspond to those four different just descriptions.
So we've replaced vagueness where the feature is not specified at all anywhere to a four way ambiguity, but in fact there's no more information.
It's just multiply it out in a more explicit way and again, across through a comparison.
And there's a requirement that these feature structures are complete and what they
call sort of and therefore it would push towards ambiguity instead of vagueness,
because every proper representation has to have every feature instantiate.
And LFG, we tried to. Suppressed that again, so the important stuff shows up.
So and I don't know if you those of you who've seen.
Heg, future structures, they really are quite enormous and partly that's because of the sort solving that we're talking about here,
but also because in that theory they take it as they have an advantage that all the linguistic information,
syntactic information can be encoded in a single structure,
that you can encode precedence and dominance, relationships that we could separately in the tree.
With these future properties and it's kind of an Occam's Razor argument that says, well,
if you can coated in one formal system, that's an advantage from the point of view.
We have a different intuition about it, which is let's separate these things out.
And hopefully the interactions between them will be relatively few compared to the interactions
between the elements of the sea structure internally and the elements of the structure internally.
So that's kind of a conceptual framing of our value statement, I guess, of what these theories tend to go for.
So now when you do have these completely unspecified features, they can take on particular values determined by the context that they appear in.
So in the context of when the fish eats the sheep,
where the no agreement from eats imposes no singular on its subject, then we would expect to find in the structure.
We do find that the fish now is marked as no singular, not because of its inherent marking,
which was unspecified, but because the context imposed that marking.
Whereas in the case of eight, where it's not marked at all, that feature would not appear because the minimal model would not contain it.
Now we also get the case that these kind of inferred values.
May clash by virtue of transitivity, so we have this ungrammatical sentence,
the fish that eat swims where there seems to be an agreement between the verb of the clause, the relative clause and the main clause.
But that's a consequence of the fact that they are both imposing information on fish,
which itself is unspecified, but in but these two assertions basically assert conflicting values.
And the sentence therefore doesn't have a model structure. The description doesn't have a model.
So there have been also some ways of dealing with these kinds of syncretic situations by introducing a new class of values,
pushing the destruction into the structure.
And Larry Carter made one of the early proposals for this, so you might think of the value of number four fish is.
A special value was singular or plural, and then you don't get the multiplication that's added low,
but you still know what the value possibilities are in the easy case,
this is limited to very simple values, doesn't obviously extend to where the alternatives have to do with different
relations being assigned and the interaction of more intricate value dependencies.
And it also has a feeling of mixing up the true theory of the computation that you do to verify things with the model theory,
which is just to look at the results and see what you have.
This kind of representation is very good for computation. I don't think it's so good for linguistics and there is a computational interpretation of
all this that is sound incomplete in the work that John Max when I did over the years.
And it's the kind of thing that's actually needed for high speed passing your generation.
It's basically a way of converting the descriptions from destructive normal form to conjunctive normal form.
But again, I don't think it's good for linguistic explanation in particular.
So now I'm going to turn to a next kind of understood figure, but I'm calling constrained under specification.
So the notion here is that some, but not all possible values are allowed.
So it's a proper subset of the declared value.
So case, for example, that has accusative, nominative and genitive.
Well. And you have a word like that, I like it, that is either unmarked or ambiguous with respect to accusative.
And nominative appeared an object on such a position, but it cannot appear as a possessive, so it's not possible for him to be.
For it to be. Genitive.
So how can we describe that? Well, we can have a disjunction of possible values, so in its lexical entry,
it says that its case is accusative or its case is nominative and an equivalent logically
equivalent to a little bit more succinct formulation of that is to say that its case is a member
of the accused it of the nominative and then the axiom of extension and so forth would basically
say that the destruction is an immediate consequence of that more compact representation.
And that's just saying that we can add step membership and sets to the description language in a really easy and obvious way.
And it lets us to express things a little bit more succinctly with a little bit less repetition and clutter.
So give him that description, the f structure will have specific values in the minimal models.
And again, depending on the context, there may be several models, but maybe not all possible models.
So we have a notion of restricted ambiguity.
Now, an alternative to that is to use negative constraints to simply say some values are not possible, like genitive is not possible.
So instead of saying what values are possible in enumerating them, we can enumerate the values that are to be excluded.
Now, that may be a smaller set, easier to describe and so forth.
So we might say that. Simply by writing not equal and adding that to our description, language that the case is not genitive.
Instead of saying that the case is a member of the most succinct form of the accusative and nominative and we the structure,
then perhaps there would be no value in the minimal model unless it's required by other constraints.
And the interpretation of this is in the minimal model itself, and the interpretation is that if the feature case is present,
it may not be, but if it is present, it must not be genitive.
So a negative specification here is interpreted in the mental model.
As opposed to putting in all the ways in which. Case could not be genitive, which would revert to the explicit enumeration again,
so this negative specification is brings brings into view the significance of
the minimal model in the interaction between descriptions and satisfy ability.
But what if you wanted to say that either the feature must be present?
Or it must be absent. But in the constrained here, we don't where we're setting this constraint, we actually don't care what the values are.
We don't want to enumerate them at all. Let somebody else someplace else in the grammar to the enumeration.
So, again, we have John likes Mary. And in terms of the categories John liking Mary, what would have the same sea structure?
But it's a participle and and not it. Not a text form.
So how would we describe that?
Well, one way is to clutter up the description and the structure structure by adding basically a complement of values,
a new value that is inconsistent with any of the other values that are allowed for that feature.
So for likes, we could say that it's Tensas Prison, but it is not a participle.
And for liking, we could say that it's a participle.
But it's not a tense form, and in the grammar, we could specify because we know that the VPs in essence, are supposed to be tensed.
We can say that the tense is not mom, not none.
Or we could say with the participle is none. And either way, we would exclude the John liking Mary and get a tense form.
But we would also get it with this not unclutter description, but cluttered f structure where at the top level we're saying, yeah, it is tense.
But also, by the way, we're recording the fact that it's not a participle, which is kind of a silly thing to see.
So there's an alternative to that.
That again, goes up this clustering idea. And here we're talking about what we call existential constraints.
So, again, the description of the structure, we want absolute values to be absent.
So we would like likes to just say that it's tenses present and liking just to say
that it's a present participle and not get mixed up one feature with the other,
but set up the description. So again, extending the description language to minimise the descriptions and the structures.
So setting up the description language so that we can specify with notation the requirements that we want to impose on the minimal model.
So if we write just how tense a designator for the future without a value, we interpret that that the minimal model must have some value for tense.
If we write. And we wouldn't do this before.
But with the negation sign, we say that the participle does not exist in the middle one minimal model.
We can write that as well. But of course, our preference in this situation would be to just say that we want it to be tense,
to not worry about all the other things that could have been.
So the idea is that the description of language itself is extended with these existential constraints.
They apply to the minimal model of all the other equations.
And if the constraint is positive, it's satisfied if the minimal model contains an attribute.
That attribute with any value and if it's negative, the model's OK, if that does not contain.
An attribute at all. So this is part of the election strategy, the media strategy is to enrich descriptions and the description language.
In service of expressing abstract notions that seem to have linguistic significance and be able to
maintain the simple structures and even as the simple way in which the description is deployed.
So. And turning to another kind of unmarked value that I call the conventionally unmarked values,
and these are more like an analogy to what you see in phrenology,
where you know that if Nassau's an unmarked feature, then there's a convention that says at some point, you know, that that means.
That it's positive, so the notion here is that no future value means a particular one, presumably one that is.
Unexceptional or common or typical, not worth specifying, but you know that it's their.
And again, the idea is the destruction you have to scriptura not cluttered with these unexceptional values.
An example here is the fact that in English, the first and second person.
Are exceptional, the person barking only applies. To pronouns, but all the other nouns in the world are unexceptional in third person,
so why should we have to always specify everywhere that nouns are third person?
So for fish, we would have to write if we had to specify that the person is third.
But we'd rather just say, look, we know the. That person is not there.
It means that it's third if anybody ever cares.
So basically in syntactic dependencies that might apply to missing values, we can use existential constraints to code these marking conventions.
So can the unmarked value here. The convention is that in this particular case, if you don't see a person.
It acts as if the person had been specified as third, but we don't need to say that it goes without saying so,
we have a problem, obviously, with subject for agreement in English.
So it says that either it's marked for person.
Which would be true for the first and second persons and not true for the third or as plural eat, so eat and eat.
I would say it's not marked for purpose, which means a third.
And it's singular. So, again, the structure doesn't have to record third person everywhere, ordinary nouns, we're using this disjunction and.
Existential, positive and negative in the description language itself to code the intuition that goes with a more explicit feature.
So the structure of consumer semantics must be informed if it matters.
And if we don't actually fill in the interface,
that the interface doesn't actually fill in the value according to a marking convention that stated off to the side.
But the grammar itself has embedded within it by the use of the way it refers to person.
Assigning a particular meaning to the absence of a value.
Now, that's a little bit different from but it has a feeling like default values.
So here the notion is that an exception on unexceptional values always appear,
even if it's hard to find a place in the grammar where you would specified.
So it may be easier to find the place, but it may mean that you have to specify them everywhere.
Whenever you're specifying another value, you have to have an alternative that says if that one isn't taken, then stick in the default.
So the idea is here we're getting an uncluttered description with a single statement that assigns the default if no value was assigned elsewhere,
and there isn't a need to add disjunctive alternatives at all the places where other values are assigned.
So the description is uncluttered, but here we're not interested in uncovering the structure.
In this case, we we have the minimal model. Always will contain a future value.
It will always be filled in in the middle animal model.
So how do we do that again?
We're using existential constraints and destruction. So we want to assign the nominal nominative as the default case.
That would be the assertion that either the case exists in the A model, that is,
it was assigned as accusative or nominative or whatever it was, or dative or gender or whatever someplace else and some other construction or.
We're going to be looking at a model where we can assert that the case itself is nominative and if it was filled in.
Elsewhere to some other value, that model, that that description will fail.
If it wasn't filled in elsewhere, that minimal model will now have the case nominative filled in.
So we end up with two have descriptions to animal models possibly.
Again, the description of the accident with the existential will fail if there is no separate assignment someplace else for case,
the description with the quality will fail somewhere else.
There's an incompatible assignment, and otherwise mom is just filled in.
So one of these descriptions is always satisfied, there's never a failure that comes from assigning a default feature,
and that's kind of the meaning of what it means to be a default.
You can always throw it in and it kind of lfg throwing it in at the end is formalised as testing against the minimal model.
So to compact the notation a little bit with over the years introduced a template that just wraps up.
Under a name default, this kind of destruction in the way it operates so that we can simply write the default value
from this case and that expands out to either there is a case or the case has that value.
Now, the default kind of is like unmarked, but it's not.
The values for default always appear.
The values for unmarked never appear, and the absence of value has a meaning.
When we're crossing it, module interfaces, it may be that these.
Converge because the marketing conventions apply to.
To fill out the unmarked case, even if it wasn't really necessary throughout the grammar.
So there's one other aspect in the formalisation of defaults,
which I describe as the separation of the terms with the notation scope and the value scope of the default.
So the notation scope has to do with where you can write down these up arrows and
down arrows and what they refer to to add the default specification to the grammar.
And in all of you, you have to write them somewhere. So that's the notation scope.
And again,
some of the theories there are these metter principles that operate that are kind of universally quantified statements over the feature structure.
So we might say, well, no matter how the feature structure rises for all units of our feature structure,
if it has some property, it has some other property. We don't have that in our and theories that do have that kind of formulation.
HPLC,
I think of as one of them that can introduce a lot of hard mathematical issues to side ability issues when you do these universal qualifications.
So we avoid that kind of thing because we really do want to have concrete computational behaviour.
So that's the notation scope, the value scope. Is the fact that explicit values can propagate?
By transitivity or substitution of equality from one place in the structure to another, and that describes the scope of the default.
So in this little diagram here, we might specify inside the noun phrase that the case defaults to nominative.
But the value spoke and read the value nominative could be supplied from any construction anywhere.
And it would possibly fill in that value and so.
The default is kind of a global anywhere in the middle, a model that's going to be established, but we might want to lower the value scope.
So that this default has to be resolved within the boundaries.
You basically say.
If the noun phrase internally and it's the description of the nodes in that structure with its up arrows and counters doesn't provide value for case,
then at this point we're going to assert that case because there is effectively the idea almost
as that there's a minimal model within a constituent where we can evaluate these constraints.
These defaults and then add the values there and now if the scope above.
The structure above conflicts, it's an incompatible value, there will be a failure as opposed to, oh, we simply won't use the default.
So in the embeddedness, notion of default is the is the domain in which the default is activated,
and we might want to say, for example, that some features are.
Receive their default value, their lexical defaults,
and the fact it's instantiated to the lexical default value when the lexicon is exited and therefore it's established and can be checked,
for example, in the higher, higher scope. So there are variations on this.
And the issue in the formalism is how do you specify something that you'd like to be able to control?
And again, in the trade off between, you could cut up lots of features that propagate the scope and where you are and what you're doing.
But again,
we've realised that in a built in a predicate where you can simply write down the case must be complete in the noun phrase with interpretation.
If if the case feature doesn't exist. Within the noun phrase, it will never be specified within the noun phrase and the default applies,
it becomes normative and that's the way that feature is seen in any higher context.
So the last thing I want to mention is what we call indeterminate values,
and that's the really challenging case for equality and unification based theories, because that's the case where transitivity fails.
And the problem is that the same form satisfies appears to satisfy conflicting feature requirements on the classic case against.
The German treaty relative and I don't speak German, only vaguely going to pronounce this, but the.
So here we have a free relative where the relative pronoun boss is the object of the Ferguson and the subject of Goodrich.
And in the one case, there's the specifications accuse it of when it's the object and then the other, it's the specific specified as being nominative.
And obviously that's going to fail and getting rid of the arrows and the F1 and all that, I'll just substitute the verbs to keep track here.
So basically it all comes down to the Gessen's objects cases accused of on the other side, the subject cases nominative.
The pronoun is both the object of one and the subject of the other.
Now you do substitution of equality and transitivity, so you take each of those in middle equality, substitute them in the.
Case features and you end up with the best cases of Cusato accusative and its sequel,
The Nominative, which implies that nominative and sequel to Accusative, and that's not true.
So. The equality here seems to be too strong because we'd like this to be grammatical,
and yet the machinery rules it out now it's the equality and the transitivity that's doing the damage here.
It's in the construction itself. That really doesn't matter if, how, if or how we specify or under specify the properties of the pronoun.
So we could say that it's destructively OK for it to be nominative or accusative.
We can not say anything. We could say that the case belongs to the set.
We can say that the case is not genitive for data or whatever we want to say.
All of that doesn't matter.
Well, because it's not really the fact that the pronoun which is underspecified in a way because it cannot be data and so forth,
but that's not the source of the problem. The problem is equality itself.
And so Mary and I actually took on this challenge in the 90s and we came up with a solution.
And the idea was to replace atomic values and the transitivity of equality that go with them with
stats and set membership for the class of these features that can be indeterminate in this way.
So the value specification is to say that the case is the nominative accusative, as opposed to saying that it's a member of the set.
But the value checking is done, done by membership and then the structure you have a value which is in fact a set value in the structure itself.
So if we looked at this before, well, now we're going to say that the case is equal to nominative accusative before the succinct form was membership.
Before we tested by saying that the value was accused of.
Now we're going to test by checking to see whether the value that we're interested in is a member of the.
So now we look at that little deduction where we've gotten the membership instead of the quality,
and we end up when we distribute the equality and do the transitivity,
just that that set has two different members, which is perfectly fine because that's what it is.
But it only has just those particular members.
So if anywhere else. Was asserted that the case was genitive testing in that way.
That would be unsatisfying as it should be. Now.
And in this setup, grammatical functions and many other features, the determinate ones we can call them, still propagate with equality.
There are a lot of other interactions with other kinds of constructions, with coordination, with modification and so forth,
that just the basic idea has to interact with and in some context is in determining values.
Canaro and that's work that Mary and Tracy Sadler worked on.
And actually, I also looked at that problem in a later paper.
I'm not going to say any more about that.
I'm just going to stop here with the summary, just to point out that under specification is an important technique.
With the goal of suppressing clutter so that generalisations are easier to see.
The point here is that it's not a singular notion,
the different types of specification or formalised in different ways and express different intuitions.
The tree architecture and the formalism allows us to kind of articulate how all that works.
And importantly in all of this is this notion of the minimal model that we can
expect and examine and and compare some of the things that are not mentioned,
we can actually conceptualise and examine later at a different point in the architecture.
So with that, I will stop and I hope I haven't gone beyond the margins of.
Of the time period, but thank you all.
Thank you very much, Ron. Thank you, Ron. That was because a few minutes for questions.
So who would like to start? Perhaps you want to stop sharing the screen run,
so I have to stop sharing within an hour or two that you just click on the same box that we did last night.
I just got to find the box now on the box.
OK, so there's the box. I'm sharing.
That do it. Yes. You're back.
Yes, thank you so much. Susan Roesgen is in charge of leading the questions.
Yes. There seems to be impressed silence in following a talk with great interest,
and I've tried to compare it with how things are done in phonology that Janet has a question.
Let's start with Janet. I ca I should not be answering the asking the first question,
and we need to have at least a couple of remarks from Mary before I jump in and say anything about this,
about just fine talk to which she contributed so much to.
There you go again, Larry. I knew I had. OK, so, Ron, it's great to see you.
I haven't seen you in a very long time. And so in the phonology and if I understand correctly, in semantics and syntax, the, um,
uh, the default, um, uh, actually, there's a lot of contextual influences on the default,
uh, related to how people have built up expectations from, uh, the structural position or what came before in syntax and semantics.
That might even be the previous sentence. Uh, do you have any, uh, clues about how to handle that in this type of an approach?
So I think so the question is about contextual information that influences the defaults.
Yes, that's right. And so you need to, like, push that around somehow get right.
So there are a couple of issues. One is the way history is imposed on what's happening in a particular utterance.
So if we think of the particular. So. The if you think about it differently,
there's a certain kind of delay that's built in or a deferral that's built into this notion of default, the intuition of a default is.
Wait until you know everything that you're going to know and then if you haven't been told.
Stick this in, and if you need to pass that off to somebody who cares and was waiting for you to tell them,
you know, whether it was person 3rd or whether it was, you know, whatever property you're looking at.
Well, the idea of the default is deferral until now, the question is, is it deferred within the syntax or as I say,
the value scope with a very limited kind of value scope or larger value scope or within the sentence as a whole?
Or does that scope get enlarged in some way? So it includes history as well.
And that's what that trade off is. So how long or over what structures do you want to do the deferral before you make the commitment?
And people also talk about the physical values that, you know, sticking to value,
but if something else comes along and overrides it, then I can replace that value without getting a clash.
This kind of set up here is trying to formalise what it means to be in that situation.
And again, it comes to what is the scope of which this default bigger on this real.
No, that's no good.
You you know, but that's the intuition here, it's an intuition of deferral in the absence of information that may come later.
How much later? Not too much later. Yeah.
Yeah, that's too much. Yeah. For example, I mean, you could take these these type of things and say, well, just keep them in the description.
Keep both models open. And then.
The context comes along and picks and helps to pick out one of those models.
So it's a very good question. Well, it fits in this framework, so when you add other stuff, it would tend to imply that you're.
Mental representation of the context is basically using the same type of representation
and pushing a lot of fragmented formalism is that it's not a corrective action,
right? Exactly. Or, you know, some sort of mental representation of the original book we call the mental representation of grammatical relations.
And the idea was our hypothesis from my work as a psychologist.
And the pre-election history of this was that these notions of grammatical relation were the primitive.
Cognitive. Notions.
That's what we needed to have a formal way of modelling.
So. You know, I think you know what's going on, you had a question and I've taken my hand down, I think I've been answered.
I would like to come next. I want to make just another comment about if you see my comment is now that you are retiring.
Maybe we can do more of this. That would be ideal chance.
Yes. Would you like to say something?
Yeah, I actually I mean, along those lines, I'm actually kind of along the lines of what you were just talking about with with Janet's question.
I was kind of thinking about this. Now I forget what you call it, the local one that says that, you know, if you if you have a feature value,
it has to be you have to find it within a certain local domain, you know, you would never find it at.
Yes, so it seems to me as kind of an. We could probably do that, not just a formal distinction,
that's kind of an interesting type of logical difference between different kinds of features and trying to figure out what that difference is.
And I just wonder, I mean, is it morphologically expressed teachers versus teachers that aren't morphologically expressed?
Is it features that are expressed on the head always or in that particular language or I mean,
there's all sorts of things that could correlate with that.
I just wondered if you had any thoughts about things that tend to correlate with that kind of stuff.
Like, I have an intuition and I think probably a lot of people.
I have an intuition about this kind of lexical scope.
If you look at morphology, so obviously there's a whole morphological component and we know from the syntax,
we can think of these four form items, but of course, it's all decomposed. We have some lexical rules and all that kind of stuff.
But the lexical there's a notion that when you leave the lexicon,
certain features that may be more difficult to exactly pin down where they had to be specified that, you know.
When you're leaving the lexicon, they get pinned down.
And people have had this intuition and it shows up in the literature, and I've always been troubled by it because from the point of view,
infrastructure doesn't make any sense at all, this notion of lexical integrity.
And, you know, I've always seen well, that's what you say when you want to argue against minimalism.
But otherwise, it has no significance, just says that you can't have infl separated off someplace and syntax.
It has to be in a word. So but that notion of lexical integrity maybe has to do with this notion of the values code.
And that's that's my intuition about what's going on here and now, whether it's inside a noun phrase or,
you know, higher up things, that may be a different set of issues. But it's kind of a way of relating, of controlling the source of information.
And giving this kind of non monotonic way of making decisions in the middle of derivations.
Well, you know, if it's something that I know from a very prepared theoretical.
Feels right. And the question is, how would you formalise it, and that's what this is, how would you formalise?
That feels right, Knowshon?
Now, had we been in a real situation, we could have continued this for a long time and unfortunately, I see that people are leaving us.
So that's a wrap. But yes, a.
Yes, I just Mary, as as the faculty board chair this time, but also as a friend was right next door to you on the corridor,
I just would like to end by saying thank you so much for whatever you've done for the faculty all along,
not just for your students and your colleagues, but for the entire faculty as diverse as the U.S. and everything else that you've done for us.
But I'm just going to miss you tremendously.
But fortunately, I'll be leaving soon after so that we can both be at retirement and work more and and specification.
And I can ask you about technology, as I used to before.
So thank you very much from from the faculty. And this is what's coming.
And it's been overwhelming and really, really delightful. Excellent.
Well, we hope that we can meet in person again very soon so that we extend this longer.
But, Ron, can you thank you also for being so very kind to join us today in this way.
So I'm not going to ask anyone else who wants to speak because otherwise people will either miss their dinner or everything else.
And so, as John Coleman says, more uproarious applause.
Right. Thank you very much indeed.