Parse examples

Example structures generated by the book's French grammar

Along the 8 chapters of the book, the implementation of a computational grammar of French in the LFG/XLE formalism is explained step by step. Here are some example f-structures and c-structures generated by the XLE parser from the book's final grammar fragment.

How to buy the book

The book can be ordered directly from Stauffenburg Verlag:

http://www.stauffenburg.de/asp/books.asp?id=1356

New LFG book's cover

New LFG book's description

Reference

Christoph Schwarze and Leonel F. de Alencar. 2016. Lexikalisch-funktionale Grammatik. Eine Einführung am Beispiel des Französischen mit computerlinguistischer Implementierung (Lexical-Functional Grammar: A French-based Introduction with Computational Implementation). Tübingen: Stauffenburg. X, 271 pp. Stauffenburg Einführungen, 30. ISBN 978-3-95809-411-6.

Abstract

Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) is a well-established formalism for writing grammars of any natural language. Being explicit, LFG grammars can be implemented on the computer, which makes it possible to impartially test grammatical analyses against large amounts of data.

To profit from the LFG formalism's amenableness to empirical testing, this Introduction combines grammatical analysis with its implementation. It introduces the LFG model step by step, simultane­ously developing increasingly complex computational grammar fragments of French. These frag­ments are implemented in the Xerox Linguistic Environment (XLE), the state-of-the-art grammar development tool for the LFG formalism. The book also shows how word tokenization and in­flectional morphology may be implemented in terms of Finite State Morphology using the Xerox Finite State Tools (XFST) and how they may be integrated into the XLE French grammar fragment. No previous knowledge of XLE or XFST is assumed; formal devices and techniques are gradually explained in the course of the book's 8 chapters. All XLE and XFST grammar code, test sets, scripts, etc. from the book will soon be freely available for download on Github at https://github.com/lfg-french-grammar/book.

The book addresses crucial topics of French syntax, such as agreement, the subject clitic, the adjective, prepositions, determiners, sentential complements, infinitives and control verbs, the pas­sive, auxiliary selection in compound tenses, as well as a fragment of verb inflection, including stem variations induced by the orthography. Apart from its use as an introductory textbook or self-study manual for LFG or for French syntax from a lexical-functional perspective, the book can be used as well as an introduction to grammar development with XLE and Finite-State Morphology with XFST.

 Intended users are students of computer science, natural language processing, and compu­tational linguistics on the one hand, and of theoretical linguistics or Romance linguistics on the other. The text is in German, but all LFG, XLE and XFST rules and representations are conform to the English-based, international usage.

Keywords: Computational Linguistics, Computational Syntax, Computational Morphology, Finite-State Morphology, Generative Syntax, Generative Grammar, Lexical-functional Grammar, French Grammar, French Syntax 

About the authors

Christoph Schwarze taught Romance Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Konstanz, Germany. 
Leonel Figueiredo de Alencar teaches German linguistics at the Depart­ment of Foreign Languages and Literatures, and computational linguistics at the Graduate Pro­gram in Linguistics of the Federal University of Ceará in Fortaleza, Brazil. He is also collaborator researcher at the Group of Computer Networks, Software Engineering, and Systems (GREat).