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Development of maximally reusable grammars: Parallel development of Hebrew and Arabic grammars
(2015)
We show how linguistic grammars of two different yet related languages can be developed and implemented in parallel, with language-independent fragments serving as shared resources, and language-specific ones defined separately for each language. The two grammars in the focus of this paper are of Modern Hebrew and Modern Standard Arabic, and the basic infrastructure, or core, of the grammars is based on "standard" HPSG. We identify four types of relations that exist between the grammars of two languages and demonstrate how the different types of relations can be implemented in parallel grammars with maximally shared resources. The examples pertain to the grammars of Modern Hebrew and Modern Standard Arabic, yet similar issues and considerations are applicable to other pairs of languages that have some degree of similarity.
Multi-word expressions (MWEs) are challenging for grammatical theories and grammar development since they blur the traditional distinction between the lexicon and the grammar, and vary in the degree of idiosyncrasy with respect to their semantic, syntactic, and morphological behavior. Nevertheless, the need to incorporate MWEs into grammars is unquestionable, especially in light of estimates claiming that MWEs account for approximately half of the entries in the lexicon. In this study we focus on verbal MWEs in Modern Hebrew: we consider different types of this class of MWEs, and propose an analysis in the framework of HPSG. Moreover, we incorporate this analysis into HeGram, a deep linguistic processing grammar of Modern Hebrew.
In this paper we investigate the status of control constructions in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). MSA has several embedded clause constructions, some of which resemble control in English (and other languages). However, these constructions exhibit some notable differences. Chief among them is the fact that the embedded verb carries agreement features that can indicate both coreference and disjoint reference between a matrix argument and the understood subject of the complement clause. We conducted a thorough corpus-based investigation of such constructions, with a special focus on a search for obligatory control in the language. We show that our findings contradict accepted generalizations (and predictions) proposed by state-of-the-art theories of control, as they indicate that there are no "real" control predicates in MSA. We outline an HPSG analysis that accounts for the MSA data.
Nonverbal predicates in Modern Hebrew have been the subject of investigation in a number of studies. However, to our knowledge, none of them was corpus-based. Corpus searches reveal that the nonverbal constructions which are most commonly addressed in the literature are not the most commonly used ones. Once a broader range of data is considered additional issues are raised. Our analysis addresses these issues, unifying the treatment of three types of copular constructions that we identify in MH. The analysis is implemented as part of a larger-scale grammar, and is extensively tested.