A Schematic AVM

The following is a schematic AVM taken from Cooper (1996:192-193). It shows some of the attributes that can be part of a sign.

    (Cooper, 1996: 193)

Notes on attributes:

- SYNSEM feature structures have a LOCAL or a NON-LOCAL attribute.

- The value of the LOCAL attribute contains three attributes: CATEGORY, CONTENT and CONTEXT.  The last two are important for semantic interpretation and in accounts of agreement (as illustrated in the introduction of tags in section 2.1).

- The value of CATEGORY allows for three attributes: HEAD, SUBCAT and LEX.

- The HEAD attribute encodes all the syntactic features that a head and its phrasal constituent have in common, including whether the constituent is nominal, verbal, prepositional etc.  Case and form features are added to head features in nominals.  For verbal constituents, head features include information on the form of the verb (base, present, participle etc), whether the verb is headed by an auxiliary, whether it is part of an inverted construction etc.

- NON-LOCAL attributes are used to account for unbounded dependencies, wh-marking and the marking of relative clauses.

- The value of NON-LOCAL contains the INHERITED and the TO-BIND attributes.  Each of these attributes contains in their values SLASH, QUE and REL attributes which contain sets as values.

- In the case of SLASH, this is the set of extracted elements from the constituent in question.

- In the case of QUE, the value set is the set of wh-words in the constituent

- The value set of REL is the set of relative pronouns.  These sets are empty in canonically-ordered non-relativized non-questions.