Towards the computational implementation of Role and Reference Grammar: Rules for the syntactic parsing of RRG Phrasal constituents

Francisco José Cortés-Rodríguez

doi:10.5209/rev_clac.2016.v65.51982

Francisco José Cortés-Rodríguez

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.5209/rev_clac.2016.v65.51982

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Abstract

The goal of this work is twofold: on the one hand, it seeks to update the description of phrasal constituents in Role and Reference Grammar; on the other, it aims at providing a computational implementation of such structures within the Grammar Development Environment, a component of ARTEMIS (“Automatically Representing Text Meaning via an Interlingua-Based System”), a Natural Language Processing prototype developed with the aim of binding natural language fragments with their corresponding grammatical and semantic structures.In order to attain both tasks the analysis focuses specifically on the design of the rules that would account for the linkage between the syntactic and the semantic representations of Referential Phrases, as proposed initially in RRG. This proposal involves a reinterpretation of the constituents and operators in the Layered Structure of the RP taking into account that in ARTEMIS the assignment of a syntactic-semantic structure to a given sequence is based on the activation of grammatical rules plus a set of Attribute Value Matrixes related to the grammatical features of the constituents of RPs.

Highlights

Francisco José Cortés-Rodríguez Instituto Universitario de Lingüística ‘Andrés Bello’, Universidad de La Laguna fcortes en ull edu es
The goal of this work is twofold: on the one hand, it seeks to update the description of phrasal constituents in Role and Reference Grammar; on the other, it aims at providing a computational implementation of such structures within the Grammar Development Environment, a component of ARTEMIS (“Automatically Representing Text Meaning via an Interlingua-Based System”), a Natural Language Processing prototype developed with the aim of binding natural language fragments with their corresponding grammatical and semantic structures
The goal of this work is twofold: on the one hand, it seeks to update the description of phrasal constituents in RRG, taking into account Van Valin’s (2008) programmatic proposal, which brings about some significant variations in the interpretation of phrasal constituents as they were originally described in Van Valin and LaPolla (1997) and Van Valin (2005); on the other, it aims at providing a computational implementation of such structures within the Grammar Development Environment (GDE), a component of ARTEMIS whose task is to provide an effective parsing of morphosyntactic structures

Summary

Lange ist eingeschalafen

The.M.Sg.NOM tall be.3SGPRES fall asleep.PASTPART (‘The tall one has fallen asleep’). A preliminary general scheme of the LSRP is given in the following figure6:. Clac 65/2016, 75-108 cortés-rodríguez: rrg phrasal constituents 85 The following examples have been borrowed from Van Valin (2005: 25) and adapted to the new format of analysis in RRG: (10) The three big bridges (11) The construction of the bridge by the company in New York City clac 65/2016, 75-108. The whole set of operators in the LSRP is given in the following table (adapted from Van Valin 2005: 24): Nuclear Operators Nominal aspect (count-mass distinction, classifiers in classifier language)

RP Operators Definiteness Deixis

Agent Theme Patient Possessor Recipient

Conclusion

Auxiliary verb