Complex Declension Systems and Morphology in Fluid Construction Grammar: A Case Study of Polish

Abstract

Different languages employ different strategies for grammatical agreement. Slavic languages such as Polish realize agreement with rich declension systems. The Polish declension system features seven cases, two number categories and is subdivided further with respect to gender and animacy. In order to differentiate among these different grammatical categories Polish exhibits a complex, syncretistic and highly irregular morphology. But not only the morphology is complex, the grammatical rules that govern agreement are, too. For example, the appropriate case of a noun in a verbal phrase does not only depend on the verb itself but also on whether the verb is in the scope of a negation or not.

In this paper we give an implementation of the Polish declension system in Fluid Construction Grammar. In order to account for the complexity of the Polish declension system we develop a unification-based formalism, called nested feature matrices. To demonstrate the power of the proposed formalism we investigate its appropriateness for solving the following linguistic problems: a) selecting appropriate morphological markers with respect to the noun’s gender and stem for expressing case and number, b) establishing phrasal agreement between nouns and other parts of speech such as verbs, and finally c) dealing with long-distance dependencies in phrasal agreement. We show that our formalism succeeds in solving these problems and that the presented implementation is fully operational for correctly parsing and producing simple Polish transitive sentences.