Static Grammars Research Articles

Cognitive status and referential acts in functional discourse grammar

In Functional Discourse Grammar, both Ascription and Reference are characterized as actional processes and are captured at the Interpersonal Level of linguistic description. Additionally, the temporal sequencing of Discourse Acts seems relevant to establishing dependency relations among them. However, the remainder of the levels of representation in the theory contain static descriptions of linguistic structures and not of processes. In this paper, I will argue that this is the result of an inherent contradiction between FDG’s characterization as a static grammar and the dynamicity of verbal interaction, which is best solved if the theory commits itself to the procedural nature of the Interpersonal Level. In order to do so, the different categories that have been identified in the literature on the cognitive status of referents should find relevance in the grammar. Elaborating upon García Velasco (2014), I will show that the temporal dimension of the text creating activity and referent accessibility, are relevant for a full account of constituent preposing in Spanish.

An Operator Precedence Parser for Standard Prolog Text

Prolog is a language with a dynamic grammar which is the result of embedded operator declarations. The parsing of such a language cannot be done easily by means of standard tools. Most often, an existing parsing technique for a static grammar is adapted to deal with the dynamic constructs. This paper uses the syntax definition as defined by the ISO standard for the Prolog language. It starts with a brief discussion of the standard, highlighting some aspects that are important for the parser, such as the restrictions on the use of operators as imposed by the standard in order to make the parsing deterministic. Some possible problem areas are also indicated. As output is closely related to input in Prolog, both are treated in this paper. Some parsing techniques are compared and an operator precedence parser is chosen to be modified to deal with the dynamic operator declarations. The necessary modifications are discussed and an implementation in C is presented. Performance data are collected and compared with a public domain Prolog parser written in Prolog. It is the first efficient public domain parser for Standard Prolog that actually works and deals with all the details of the syntax.

An Operator Precedence Parser for Standard Prolog Text

Prolog is a language with a dynamic grammar which is the result of embedded operator declarations. The parsing of such a language cannot be done easily by means of standard tools. Most often, an existing parsing technique for a static grammar is adapted to deal with the dynamic constructs. This paper uses the syntax definition as defined by the ISO standard for the Prolog language. It starts with a brief discussion of the standard, highlighting some aspects that are important for the parser, such as the restrictions on the use of operators as imposed by the standard in order to make the parsing deterministic. Some possible problem areas are also indicated. As output is closely related to input in Prolog, both are treated in this paper. Some parsing techniques are compared and an operator precedence parser is chosen to be modified to deal with the dynamic operator declarations. The necessary modifications are discussed and an implementation in C is presented. Performance data are collected and compared with a public domain Prolog parser written in Prolog. It is the first efficient public domain parser for Standard Prolog that actually works and deals with all the details of the syntax.

Dynamic parsers and evolving grammars

We define "evolving grammars" as successions of static grammars and dynamic parsers as parsers able to follow the evolution of a grammar during the source program parsing. A growing context-free grammar will progressively incorporate production rules specific for the source program under parsing and will evolve following the context created by the source program itself toward a program specific context-free grammar. Dynamic parsers and growing grammars allow a syntactic-only parsing of programs written in powerful and problem adaptable programming languages. Moreover dynamic parsers easily perform purely syntactic strong type checking and operator overloading. The language used to specify grammar evolution and residual semantic actions can be the evolving language itself. The user can introduce new syntactic operators using a bootstrap procedure supported by the previously defined syntax.A dynamic parser ("ZzParser") has been developed by us and has been successfully employed by the APE 100 INFN group to develop a programming language ("ApeseLanguage") and other system software tools for the 100 GigaFlops SIMD parallel machine under development.

On assigning pragmatic functions in English

This paper presents a discussion of the treatment of the pragmatic functions Topic and Focus in Functional Grammar (Dik: 1989, ch. 13). Two questions will be addressed: (a) the theoretical question of how the interface between the static grammar (dealing with a discourse as the product of text-creating activity) and the dynamic theory of verbal interaction (dealing with discourse as the ongoing text-creating process itself) is handled with regard to pragmatic functions; and (b) the practical question whether the reader of Dik (1989) finds a set of proposals that can be operationalized in the analysis of linguistic material. With regard to the former question we conclude that in the present FG treatment of Topic and Focus, the static and the dynamic approaches do not connect and that, as a result, the speaker’s selection of constituents for Topic or Focus function is left unaccounted for. As for the second question, we show that Dik’s proposal can be put into practice, but that the resultant analysis suffers from a number of inconsistencies and unclarities. Finally, we argue that most of these inconsistencies and unclarities can be solved if (1) we accept a different classification of Focus, and (2) assume that Topic assignment is irrelevant in English, as there is no consistent way in which Topic constituents are given special treatment, and Pl-placement can be accounted for without having to resort to Topic function.

The French National MT-Project: Technical organization and translation results of CALLIOPE-AERO

The software and lingware aspects of the CALLIOPE-AERO system derive from those of the laboratory prototypes developed at GETA (Grenoble University).1 The basic MT software, ARIANE-78, has been augmented with a translator workstation and a lexical database system from which the MT dictionaries are generated. The architecture of the lingware was designed by Professor Bernard Vauquois. For the first time, development has begun with the systematic construction of two ‘static grammars’ for French and English, before any programming of ‘dynamic grammars’.