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<Paper uid="P92-1044">
  <Title>A CCG APPROACH TO FREE WORD ORDER LANGUAGES</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper, I present work in progress on an extension of Combinatory Categorial Grammars, CCGs, (Steedman 1985) to handle languages with freer word order than English, specifically Turkish. The approach I develop takes advantage of CCGs' ability to combine the syntactic as well as the semantic representations of adjacent elements in a sentence in an incremental manner. The linguistic claim behind my approach is that free word order in Turkish is a direct result of its grammar and lexical categories; this approach is not compatible with a linguistic theory involving movement operations and traces.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> A rich system of case markings identifies the predicate-argument structure of a Turkish sentence, while the word order serves a pragmatic function. The pragmatic functions of certain positions in the sentence roughly consist of a sentence-initial position for the topic, an immediately pre-verbal position for the focus, and post-verbal positions for backgrounded information (Erguvanli 1984). The most common word order in simple transitive sentences is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb). However, all of the permutations of the sentence seen below are grammatical in the proper discourse situations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2">  (1) a. Ay~e gazeteyi okuyor.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Ay~e newspaper-acc read-present.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Ay~e is reading the newspaper.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> b. Gazeteyi Ay~e okuyor.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> c. Ay~e okuyor gazeteyi.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> d. Gazeteyi okuyor Ay~e.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> e. Okuyor gazeteyi Ay~e.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> f. Okuyor Ay~e gazeteyi.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10">  Elements with overt case marking generally can scramble freely, even out of embedded clauses. This suggest a CCG approach where case-marked elements are functions which can combine with one another and with verbs in any order.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> *I thank Young-Suk Lee, Michael Niv, Jong Park, Mark Steedman, and Michael White for their valuable advice. This work was partially supported by ARt DAAL03-89-C-0031, DARPA N00014-90-J-1863, NSF IRI 90-16592, Ben Franklin 91S.3078C-1.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> Karttunen (1986) has proposed a Categorial Grammar formalism to handle free word order in Finnish, in which noun phrases are functors that apply to the verbal basic elements. Our approach treats case-marked noun phrases as functors as well; however, we allow verbs to maintain their status as functors in order to handle object-incorporation and the combining of nested verbs. In addition, CCGs, unlike Karttunen's grammar, allow the operations of composition and type raising which have been useful in handling a variety of linguistic phenomena including long distance dependencies and nonconstituent coordination (Steedman 1985) and will play an essential role in this analysis.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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