olzama
commented
3 years ago Hi @leoalenc ,
Thanks for such a detailed issue!
Glad you were able to get the se sentences work. As for the contrast between (2) and (3), you may be right that the questionnaire doesn't fully support this yet, although I will look into this in more detail on Monday. As I said in my talk earlier this week (see slide 12), modeling the distinction between clause-embedding verbs (e.g. verbs like think and wonder) remains a bit difficult, and not only at the level of the questionnaire but even at the level of individual grammars. The distinction between want and notice I think should be easier/better established, maybe. But not in the questionnaire (yet)! :) That being said, Dan has a solution even for think vs wonder in the ERG, and other or similar solutions can be implemented for other grammars, and maybe one day we will have a cross-linguistics solution for the Matrix. I will try to look into your specific example in more detail next week to make sure I understand the issue right and am not confusing it with something else.
With that being said, here's a potentially related thread here.
leoalenc
In Romance languages like Portuguese and French, the embedded verb of clausal complements introduced by the complementizer que 'that' must be in indicative or subjunctive mood, depending on the main verb. Verbs of saying and verbs of perception, for example, require that the embedded verb be in the indicative mood, see (1), while verbs of volition require the subjunctive mood, see (2):
Other verb types, such as mental verbs, are compatible with both mood values. This depends on whether the speaker is certain or uncertain about the proposition expressed by the dependent clause. It should be noted that, in contrast to English, subjunctive mood is mandatory in cases like (2), i.e., changing the mood of the embedded verb in (2) to the indicative makes the sentence ungrammatical:
In PorGram, the HPSG Portuguese grammar I'm developing with the LinGO Grammar Matrix, in collaboration with @arademaker, I couldn't enforce this mood distinction with the customization questionnaire, as pointed out by @arademaker in our talk at the Delph-in Virtual 2021 Summit. In the questionnaire, one can specify the mood of the embedded verb as part of a complementation strategy on the Clausal Complements page. By this means, I could successfully implement the mood in complement question clauses introduced by the complementizer se 'if'. However, implementing two different strategies with the complementizer que, one associated with the indicative, the other one associated with the subjunctive, didn't prevent the grammar from overgenerating, so that sentences like (3) and (4) were wrongly treated as grammatical:
In our talk, @arademaker and I suggested that this problem could be solved by adding the option "The embedded verb" to the drop-down menu under "Specified on:" on the Lexicon page:
I tried the two existing options in the mentioned drop-down menu that seem relevant for the case at hand: "On the object" and "On the verb". However, in both scenarios, the grammar failed to parse the examples above. Apparently, object in this menu is not the object complement clause, but an NP object (which by the way the questionnaire doesn't seem to support in addition to a clausal object, e.g. I told him that she's nice., see the 2019 paper first authored by @olzama). On the other hand, verb in this menu seems to refer to the main verb, not the embedded verb. To solve the problem, I first looked at the feature structures generated by the grammar for the dependent clauses of the examples. After figuring out how the mood of the dependent clause is specified in these structures, I created the types subj-cl-verb-lex and ind-cl-verb-lex (for verbs selecting subjunctive and indicative mood, respectively) with the questionnaire and modified them by hand in the following way:
Thanks to the audience of our summit talk, I was aware of mistakes in the first version of these definitions. These wrong definitions accidentally worked fine. The new definitions above were successfully tested. Presently, PorGram is only available in a private repository, but I can grant access to it to anyone interested on testing the grammar. PorGram will be soon openly accessible.