Discovering the discourse role of converbs in Turkish discourse

Download
index.pdf
2014
Acar, Ahmet Faruk
Show full item record
276
views
201
downloads
The subordinate verb forms that occur in non-finite adverbial clauses are called converbs (Göksel & Kerslake , 2005). In Turkish, converbs can be discourse connectives as well as acting as the complement of a factive verb or an adverbial. We morphologically analyzed 15 converbs in Turkish Discourse Bank to find out possible morpho-syntactic features in order to distinguish different roles of these converbs. The aim of the study is to find out all possible roles of the converbs and the source of ambiguities as well as to find out beneficial features that may promote automatic methods to disambiguate the discourse role of the converbs, namely Simplex subordinators. For this purpose, we created a converb-corpus out of Turkish Discourse Bank. We conducted an annotation experiment with two annotators and examined the results. Also we trained a decision tree algorithm to see whether the morphological features of the right and left material of the converbs are indicative for the disambiguation task. According to the annotation results, we observed three kinds of converbs: unambiguous converbs, which always create discourse relations; ambiguous converbs, which are ambiguous between a discourse connective and a non-discourse connective role; and hard cases, which are even more ambiguous, even for the human annotators. In addition to these, we saw that the syntactic features such as the syntactic class of the converb can be essential in automatic disambiguation studies. The distance between the converb and the matrix verb, and the morphological properties of the left and right edge of the converb seem to be good clues according to the machine learning experiment results.
Discourse analysis., Discourse markers., Converbs., Turkish language, Grammar, Comparative and general, Grammar, Comparative and general
http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12616941/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/23367
Graduate School of Informatics, Thesis

Suggestions

Gradient characteristics of the unaccusative/unergative distinction in Turkish : an experimental investigation
Acartürk, Cengiz; Zeyrek Bozşahin, Deniz; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2005)
This thesis investigates the gradient behaviour of monadic intransitive verb classes in Turkish, under an aspectual classification of the unaccusative/unergative verb types, namely The Split Intransitivity Hierarchy. This Hierarchy claims that intransitive verb types are subject to gradient acceptability in certain syntactic constructions. The methods used in judgment elicitation studies in psychophysics, such as the magnitude estimation technique have recently been adapted to be used in capturing gradient ...
Measuring empirical bias toward ergativity and accusativity
Şakiroğulları, Çağrı.; Bozşahin, Hüseyin Cem; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2019)
Starting with six word order possibilities for a basic transitive clause, exposed data can bias English children to the point of making a categorial distinction for SVO. However, for an SVO language there are two categorial possibil- ities, an ergative and an accusative one. The acquisition of ergativity and accusativity is a complex phenomenon, since they both have similar phono- logical structure for the baby. We show, using Eve database of CHILDES, that these possibilities can be acquired from exposed da...
The Second language processing of nominal compounds: a masked priming study
Çelikkol Berk, Nurten; Kırkıcı, Bilal; Department of English Language Teaching (2018)
The primary purpose of the present study was to understand the workings of the cognitive mechanisms underlying L2 morphological processing, and more particularly, to explore how noun-noun compounds in L2 English are processed by native speakers of Turkish in the earliest stages of word recognition. Furthermore, the study investigated the role of constituent morphemes in the processing of compound words and examined whether or not a compound word primes its first and second constituents equally. The final pu...
A type system for combinatory categorial grammar
Erkan, Güneş; Bozşahin, Hüseyin Cem; Department of Computer Engineering (2003)
This thesis investigates the internal structure and the computational representation of the lexical entries in Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG). A restricted form of typed feature structures is proposed for representing CCG categories. This proposal is combined with a constraint-based modality system for basic categories of CCG. We present some linguistic evidence to explain why both a uni cation-based feature system and a constraint-based modality system are needed for a lexicalist framework. An implem...
Automatic sense prediction of explicit discourse connectives in Turkish with the help of centering theory and morphosyntactic features
Çetin, Savaş; Zeyrek Bozşahin, Deniz; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2018)
Discourse connectives (and, but, however) are one of many means of keeping the discourse coherent. Discourse connectives are classified into groups based on their senses (expansion, contingency, etc.). They describe the semantic relationship of two discourse units. This study aims to build a machine learning system to predict the sense of explicit discourse connectives on the Turkish Discourse Bank data, which is manually gold-annotated. To do so, this study examines the effect of several features: i.e. tra...
Citation Formats
A. F. Acar, “Discovering the discourse role of converbs in Turkish discourse,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2014.
METU IIS - Integrated Information Service open@metu.edu.tr