[Prev][Next][Index]

XTAG meeting on February 8: Talk by Kim Gerdes


Hi all,
Kim Gerdes, who is visiting us from Paris 7, will give a talk this
Thursday. The title and abstract follow:


--------------------------------------------------------------------
		A Lexicalized Tree Grammar for German
			  Kim Gerdes
		    TALANA, Univ. Paris 7

In this talk I will propose a new look on the classical topological model
of German sentence structure and its relation to Lexicalized Tree
Adjoining Grammars. After presenting an analysis of the German sentence as
a hierarchical structure of embedded topological domains, I show that the
adaptation to TAG of this view of German is difficult to realize, because
it is in contradiction with some assumptions of TAG. I believe that this
difference is on the source of the impossibility of presenting all so
called "scrambling" phenomena in TAG.  Finally I will outline a
preliminary version of a different formalism that keeps many attractive
features of classical TAGs, because it is a restricted version of
Multi-component TAGs and it is still capable of combining with a simple
process lexicalized tree chunks in order to obtain the desired phrase
structure. It differs, however, in that it allows superposing of identical
branches and thus sister-adjunction. Moreover, a clear-cut distinction of
the tasks of the derived structure with respect to the derivation
structure allows more freedom in the construction of the latter, bringing
it closer to a dependency structure.