Coordination Structures in a Typed Feature Structure Grammar: Formalization and Implementation

Abstract

Every language employs its own coordination strategies, according to the type of coordinating marking, the pattern of marking, the position of the marker, and the phrase types coordinated. The SOV language Korean is intriguing in the sense that it displays almost all the possibilities of these dimensions. This paper shows how a typed feature structure grammar, HPSG, together with the notions of ‘type hierarchy’ and ‘constructions’, can provide a robust basis for parsing the coordination constructions found in the language. We show that this system induces robust syntactic structures as well as enriched semantic representations for real-time applications such as machine translation, which require deep processing of the phenomena concerned.