A Grammar Writer's Cookbook

A Grammar Writer's Cookbook is an introduction to the issues involved in the writing and design of computational grammars, reporting on experiences and analyses within the ParGram parallel grammar development project. Using the Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) framework, this project implemented grammars for German, French, and English to cover parallel corpora.

The issue of parallelism brings into focus the need to implement analyses which are crosslinguistically valid and which therefore maximize portability of the grammars' analyses to other languages. Parallelism also highlights the need for a grammar design that allows grammars to be transparent to one another across different languages. For example, the French grammar writer should be able to understand the logic underlying the implementation of the German grammar.

This cookbook includes a discussion of the standard range of constructions that need to be implemented in a wide-coverage grammar, and provides sample analyses for each of the three languages. In addition, it examines the theoretical and practical issues which arose in the course of grammar development and presents the implementation of new theoretical developments in LFG.

Miriam Butt is a research scientist at the University of Konstanz. Tracy Holloway King is a research associate at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Maria-Eugenia Niño is a doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University. Frédéroque Segond is a researcher at Xerox Research Centre for Europe within the Multilingual Theory and Technology (MLTT) team.

Abbreviations

1 Introduction

1.1 Parallel Grammars
1.2 Overview of LFG
1.3 Levels of Representation
1.4 Implementation and Environment

Part I The Grammars: General Analyses

2 The Clause

2.1 Root Clauses

2.1.1 Declaratives
2.1.2 Interrogatives
2.1.3 Imperatives

2.2 Embedded Clauses

2.2.1 Subcategorized Declaratives
2.2.2 Subcategorized Interrogatives

2.3 Clausal Adjuncts

2.3.1 Infinitival Adjuncts
2.3.2 Participial
2.3.3 Finite

2.4 What about X' Theory

3 Verbal Elements

3.1 Subcategorization
3.2 Non Verbal Subcategorization
3.3 Types of Grammatical Functions

3.3.1 Subjects
3.3.2 Objects
3.3.3 Secondary Objects (OBJ2)
3.3.4 Obliques
3.3.5 XCOMP and COMP
3.3.6 Adjuncts

3.4 Altering Subcategorization Frames
3.5 Auxiliaries

3.5.1 Brief Introduction to the Auxiliary System
3.5.2 Previous Analyses
3.5.3 Flat F-structure Analysis
3.5.4 Morphosyntactic Structure
3.5.5 The Treatment of Tense/Aspect
3.3.6 Adjuncts

3.6 Modals
3.7 Particle Verbs
3.8 Predicates

3.8.1 Controlled Subject Analysis
3.8.2 Predlink Analysis

3.9 Bridge Verbs
3.10 Verb Complexes

3.10.1 German Coherent Verbs
3.10.2 French Causitives
3.10.3 Noun-Verb Constructions

4 Nominal Elements

4.1 Pronouns

4.1.1 Personal and Demonstrative Pronouns
4.1.2 Interrogative and Relative Pronouns
4.1.3 Expletive Pronouns
4.1.4 Reflexives
4.1.5 Clitics

4.2 Full Noun Phrases

4.2.1 English
4.2.2 German
4.2.3 French
4.2.4 F-Structure

4.3 Compounds and N-N Structure
4.4 Relative Clauses

4.4.1 Bound Relatives
4.4.2 Free Relatives

4.5 NPs without a Head Noun

4.5.1 Nominalized Adjectives
4.5.2 Headless NPs

4.6 The NP Squish

4.6.1 Gerunds
4.6.2 Sequential Subjects

5 Determiners and Adjectives

5.1 Determiners

5.1.1 Types of the Specifiers
5.1.2 Morphosyntactic Considerations

5.2 Adjectives

5.2.1 Prenominal Adjectives
5.2.2 Postnominal Adjectives
5.2.3 Predicative Adjectives
5.2.4 Arguments of Adjectives
5.2.5 Degrees of Comparison

6 Prepositional Phrases

6.1 Semantic Prepositions
6.2 Nonsemantic Preposition
6.3 Interrogatives and Relatives
6.4 Clause-Taking Prepositions
6.5 Multiple Prepositions

7 Adverbial Elements

7.1 Adverbs
7.2 PPs as Adverbials
7.3 NPs as Adverbials
7.4 Negation

7.4.1 Clausal Negation
7.4.2 Constituent
7.4.3 Pleonastic Negation

8 Coordination

8.1 Basic Approach
8.2 Same Category Coordination

8.2.1 General Schema
8.2.2 Special Rules for Clauses

8.3 NP Coordination

8.3.1 Basic Structure
8.3.2 Agreement

8.4 Problems

9 Special Construction

9.1 Parentheticals
9.2 Headers
9.3 Tag Questions

Part II Grammar Engineering

10 Overview

11 Architecture and User Interface

11.1 The User Interface
11.2 The XLE Output
11.3 The Architecture

11.3.1 The Tokenizer
11.3.2 The Morphological Analyzer

11.4 Lexical Lookup

11.4.1 The Types of Lexicons
11.4.2 Structure of a Lexical Entry
11.4.3 Interaction between Lexical Entries

11.5 The Chart Parser
11.6 Generation and Machine Translation

12 Finite-State Technology

12.1 Preprocessing
12.2 Multiword Expressions

12.2.1 Technical Terms
12.2.2 Idiomatic Expressions

12.3 Time Expressions
12.4 Guessers and Normalizers
12.5 Part of Speech Preprocessing

13 Modularity, Maintainability and Transparency

13.1 One Grammar, Many Cooks
13.2 Encoding Generalizations

13.2.1 Templates
13.2.2 Complex Categories
13.2.3 Lexical Rules

14 Performance

14.1 Robustness

14.1.1 Extraction of Subcategorization Frames
14.1.2 Statistical Methods and Chunk Parsing
14.1.3 Optimality Theory

14.2 Testing

14.2.1 Types of Testsuites
14.2.2 Further Tools and Databases

14.3 Measuring Performance

14.3.1 Rule Interactions
14.3.2 Grammar Internal Performance
14.3.3 Cross-grammar Performance

A Appendix: Feature Standardization

A.1 General Guidelines
A.2 Sample Features
A.3 Grammatical Functions

References
Subject Index
Name Index

4/15/99

ISBN (Paperback): 1575861704 (9781575861708)
ISBN (Cloth): 1575861712 (9781575861715)
ISBN (Electronic): 1575868423 (9781575868424)

A Grammar Writer's Cookbook

Contents

Part I The Grammars: General Analyses

Part II Grammar Engineering