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Underview
The morphology, syntactic, and tree databases together comprise the
English grammar. A lexical item that is not in the databases receives
a default tree selection and features for its part of speech and
morphology. In designing the grammar, a decision was made early on to
err on the side of acceptance whenever there are conflicting opinions
as to whether or not a construction is grammatical. In this sense,
the XTAG English grammar is intended to function primarily as an
acceptor rather than a generator of English sentences. The range of
syntactic phenomena that can be handled is large and includes
auxiliaries (including inversion), copula, raising and small clause
constructions, topicalization, relative clauses, infinitives, gerunds,
passives, adjuncts, it-clefts, wh-clefts, PRO constructions, noun-noun
modifications, extraposition, determiner sequences, genitives,
negation, noun-verb contractions, clausal adjuncts and imperatives.
XTAG Project
1998-09-14