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2026-06-08 | Maxwell

Goal: Design Grammar for Zapanese including Adjectives, Adverbs, and Relative Clauses

Summary: Grammar in progress; recursively embedded relative clauses are difficult to understand!

Work sessions

In Out Task
08:30 13:20 Understand Relative Clauses
14:30 17:30 Design Context Free Grammar to include Adjectives, Adverbs, and Relative Clauses
18:30 19:15 Become confused by Relative Clauses with Object Position gaps
19:15 19:45 Documentation of Relative Clause Learning

Wooo! Relative Clauses giving me a run for my money...

Goals

  • 🟡 [in progress] [P0] Send by EOD: samples of Sentences with Adjectives, Adverbs, Relative Clauses

  • 🟡 [in progress] [P0] Read up on ultrametric distances

TBD:

  • 🟡 [not started] [P1] Start numerically quantifying syntactic complexity (e.g. bar chart of ultrametric, # of reversals, # of internal nodes vs. various syntactic constructions )

  • E.g. one Rel Clause, one Adjective, one adverb, one CP…

Meetings

  • None

Summary

  • 🟡 [in progress] [P0] Send by EOD: samples of Sentences with Adjectives, Adverbs, Relative Clauses

  • 🟡 [in progress] [P0] Read up on ultrametric distances

Today it looks like nothing moved! More details below (Relative Clauses are one of the beasts that make sentences arbitrarily complicated).

Adjectives: No reversal in the DP domain 

HI: [The nice boy] likes [the pretty girl]
HF: [The nice boy] [the pretty girl] likes

Adverbs: 

HI: [the boy] chases [[the girl] quickly]
HF: [the boy] [quickly [the girl]] chases

Relative Clauses There are two kinds of relative clauses: (a) Subject Gap RelClauses and (b) Object Gap RelClauses

Subject Gap: [the cat that _GAP_ chases the dog]; ~> the cat is the subject; the cat is chasing the dog
Object Gap: [the cat that the dog chases _GAP_ ]; ~> the cat is the object; the dog is chasing the cat

Subject Relative Clause 

HI: [the boy [that chases the cat]] likes [the girl]
HF: [the [the cat chases that] boy] [the girl] likes

Object Relative Clauses need to continually defer the subject which creates “center embedding” I will look into center embedding and object relative clauses more tomorrow Professor Iskarous also mentioned to not add Object Relative Clauses; likely because they are harder to model with a CFG

Updated Grammar now includes Adjectives, Post-verbal adverbs, and Subject Gap Relative Clauses:

Head Initial Rule Head Final Rule
S -> DP VP S -> DP VP
DP -> NP_proper DP -> NP_proper
DP -> D NP_singular DP -> D NP_singular
VP -> V_dp DP VP -> DP V_dp
VP -> V_cp CP VP -> CP V_cp
VP -> V_intrans VP -> V_intrans
CP -> C S CP -> S C
NP_singular -> AdjP NP_singular NP_singular -> AdjP NP_singular
AdjP -> Adj AdjP -> Adj
VP -> VP AdvP VP -> AdvP VP
AdvP -> Adv AdvP -> Adv
NP_singular -> N_singular NP_singular -> N_singular
NP_singular -> NP_singular RelClause NP_singular -> RelClause NP_singular
RelClause -> Rel S_subj_gap S_subj_gap Rel
S_subj_gap -> VP S_subj_gap -> VP

P.S. Professor Andrew Simpson from the linguistics department who specializes in East Asian Syntax (has a paper on head finality in Japanese relative clauses and adjectives) helped work through different examples of Relative Clauses and recommended an introductory Japanese linguistics handbook for later when we get to full natural language: Tsujimura N. An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics. Blackwell Publishers; 1996. which I’ll pick up from Doheny library tomorrow for reference.