酷兔英语

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M

 

 

Marcus parsing
A parsing technique, not covered in COMP9414.
mass noun
A noun that cannot be counted. Water is a mass noun, as is sand (if you want to count sand, you refer to grains). Contrast count noun.
modal
A modal auxiliary is distinguished syntactically by the fact that it forces the main verb that follows it to take the infinitive form. For example, "can", "do", "will" are modal ("she can eat the pizza", "she does eat pizza", "she will eat pizza") but "be" and "have" are not ("she is eating pizza", "she has eaten pizza").
modal operator
As far as we are concerned in COMP9414, modal operators are a feature of the logical form language used to represent certain epistemic verbs like "believe", "know" and other verbs like "want", and the tense operators, which convert an untensed logical form into a tensed one.

Thus if likes1(jack1, sue1) is a formula in the logical form language, then we can constructlogical forms like know(mary1, likes1(jack1, sue1)) meaning that Mary knows that Jack likes Sue. Similarly for believe(mary1, likes1(jack1, sue1)) and want(marg1, own(marg1, (?obj : &(porsche1(?obj), fire_engine_red(?obj))))) - that's Marg wants to own a fire-engine red Porsche.
The tense operators include fut, pres, and past, representing future, present and past. For example, fut(likes1(jack1, sue1)) would represent Jack will like Sue.

See also failure of substitutivity.

mood
See also articles on individual moods.
MoodDescriptionExample
indicativeA plain statementJohn eats the pizza
imperativeA commandEat the pizza!
WH-questionA question with a phrasal answer,
often starting with a question-word
beginning with "wh"
Who is eating the pizza?
What is John eating?
What is John doing to the pizza?
Y/N-questionA question with yes/no answerDid John eat the pizza?
subjunctiveAn embedded sentence that is
counter-factual but must be expressed
to, e.g. explain a possible consequence.
If John were to eat more pizza
he would be sick.
morpheme
A unit of language immediately below the word level. See free morpheme and bound morpheme, and morphology.
morphology
The study of the analysis of words into morphemes, and conversely of the synthesis of words from morphemes.
MOST1
A rather vague natural language quantifier, corresponding to the word "most" in English. "Many", "a few", and "several" are other quantifier-type expressions that are similarly problematical in their interpretation.

 

N

 

 

N
symbol used in grammar rules for a noun.
n-gram
A n-gram is an n-tuple of things, but usually of lexical categories. Suppose that we are concerned with n lexical categories L1, L2, ..., Ln. The term n-gram is used in statistical NLP in connection with the conditionalprobability that a word will belong to Ln given that the preceding words were in L1, L2, ..., Ln–1. This probability is written Pr(Ln | Ln–1...L2L1), or more fully Prob(wiLn | wi–1Ln–1 ∧ ... ∧ win–1L1). See also bigram and trigram, and p. 197 in Allen.
nominal
Word for a noun functioning as an adjective, as with the word "wood" in "wood fire". Longer expressions constructed from nominals are possible. It can be difficult to infer the meaning of the nominal compound (like "wood fire") from the meanings of the individual words.- for instance, while "wood fire" presumably means a fire made with wood, "brain damage" means damage to a brain, rather than damage made with a brain. Another example: "noun modifier" could on the face of it either mean a noun that acts as a modifier (i.e. a nominal as just defined) or a modifier of a noun.

In fact, noun modifier is a synonym for nominal.

non-terminal
A non-terminal symbol of a grammar is a symbol that represents a lexical or phrasal category in a language. Examples in English would include N, V, ADJ, ADV (lexical categories) and NP, VP, ADJP, ADVP and S (phrasal categories). See also terminalsymbol and context-free grammar.
noun
A noun is a word describing a (real or abstract) object. See also mass noun, count noun, common noun, abstract noun, proper noun, and concrete noun.
Constrast verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection.

Noun is often abbreviated to N.

N is a lexical grammatical category.

noun modifier
= nominal.
noun phrase
Noun Phrase is a phrasal grammatical category. Noun phrase is usually abbreviated to NP. NPs have a noun as their head, together with (optionally) some of the following:
adjectives, nominal modifiers (i.e. other nouns, acting as though they were adjectives), certain kinds of adverbs that modify the adjectives, as with "very" in "very bright lights", participles functioning as adjectives (as in "hired man" and "firing squad"), cardinals, ordinals, determiners, and quantifiers. There are constraints on the way these ingredients can be put together. Here are some examples of noun phrases: Ships (as in Ships are expensive to build, three ships (cardinal + noun), all three ships (quantifier + cardinal + noun), the ships (determiner + noun), enemy ships (nominal + noun), large, grey ships (adjective + adjective + noun), the first three ships (determiner + ordinal + cardinal + noun), my ships (possessive + noun).
NP
symbol used in grammar rules for a noun phrase.
number (grammatical)
The term grammatical number refers to whether the concept described consists of a single unit (singular number), like "this pen", or to more than one unit (plural number), like "these pens", or "three pens".

In some languages other than English, there may be different distinctions drawn - some languages distinguish between one, two, and many, rather than just one and many as in English.

Nouns in English are mostly marked for number - see plural.

Pronouns and certain determiners may also be marked for number. For example, "this" is singular, but "these" is plural, and "he" is singular, while "they" is plural.

 

 



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