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<Paper uid="C88-1060">
  <Title>An Algorithm for Functional Uncertainty</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="2981" end_page="2981" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6. Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The notion of regular functional uncertainty thus has very nice mathematical properties. Our state-decomposition algorithm provides a very attractive method for resolving functional uncertainties as other phrasal and functional constraints are computed during the parse of a sentence. This algorithm expands the uncertainties incrementally, introducing at each point only as much disjunction as is necessary to avoid interactions with other functional information that has already been taken into account. We bare recently added this algorithm and the functional uncertainty notation to our LFG Grammar Writer's Workbench, and we can now rigorously but easily test a wide range of linguistic hypotheses. We have also begun to investigate a number of other computational heuristics for the efficient, controlled expansion of uncertainty.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Kaplan and Zaenen (in press) first proposed the idea of functional uncertainty as sketched in this paper to account for the properties of long-distance dependencies within the LFG h'amework.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In this fi'amework, it has already shed new light on long-standing problems like island constraints (see, e.g., /Saiki 1985/ for an application to Japanese). But the notion is potentially of much wider use: first, it can be adapted to other unification grammar formalisms to handle facts of a similar nature; and second, it can be used to handle phenomena that are traditionally not thought of as falling into the same class as long-distance dependencies but that nevertheless seem to involve nonlocal uncertainty. A discussion of its application in the LFG framework to infinitival complements can be found in/Johnson 1986/for Dutch and/Netter 1986/for German;/Karttunen (in press)/ discusses how similar extensions to Categorial Unification Grammar (CUG) can account in a simple way for related facts in Finnish that would otherwise require type-raising. Halvorsen has suggested that scope ambiguities in semantic structures might also be characterized by this device.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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