LINGUIST List 13.1608

Thu Jun 6 2002

Books: Syntax, Maria Paula Santalla del Rio

Editor for this issue: Dina Kapetangianni <dinalinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Maria Paula Santalla del Rio, A Formal Grammar of Spanish for Phrase-level Analysis by M. Paula Santalla del Rio

Title: A Formal Grammar of Spanish for Phrase-level Analysis

Publication year: 2002

Publisher: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

Book URL: http://www.usc.es/spubl/lm14.html

Author: M. Paula Santalla del Rio

ABSTRACT:

 M. Paula Santalla del Rio, A Formal Grammar of Spanish for
 Phrase-level Analysis Applied to Information Retrieval,
 Lalia, Series Maior, 14, Universidade de Santiago de
 Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, 2002.

 Linguistic fields: formal grammar and syntax
 Subject language: Spanish
 Written in: English
	
 This book describes in detail the formal grammar of Spanish
 developed, on the one hand, in the frame of the DoRo project
 (Esprit 22716), a research project in the area of
 Information Retrieval, specifically of Document Routing
 applications. On the other hand, the proposed grammar is
 conditioned by the analysis and the further automatic
 development of BDS (Base de Datos Sint�cticos-Syntatic
 Database:http://www.bds.usc.es), which, developed in the
 University of Santiago and especially organized to show
 data about verb government, contains the manual analysis of
 160.000 clauses of current Spanish. Because of the first
 aim, this is a grammar for the identification of phrases,
 because of the second one, the grammar aims at identifying
 phrases to the extent that these do match linguistic
 sequences that fill syntactic functional slots at
 clause-level analysis. This duplicity of objectives is
 accounted for especially in Chapter 4 of the book, where
 we describe the necessary adjustments (required by either
 the simpler objective of identifying sequences of phrases or
 the, more complex, objective of integrating this
 identification in a clause-level grammar) in the formal
 description of the structures dealt with in previous
 chapters.
	
 The formalism used in the description is AGFL (Affix
 Grammars over Finite Lattices,http://www.cs.kun.nl/agfl) and the
 descriptive model underlying the description is based on
 constitutive and functional principles. After the first
 chapter of introduction, Chapter 2 is devoted to the verb
 phrase, intended as any combination of verb forms,
 auxiliaries or main verbs, and clitic pronouns that can
 express a combination of voice, impersonality and argument
 subcategorization (prepositional requirements included)
 functional in a real context and obtained from the
 possibilities that for such combinations shows the verb in
 the lexical level. Chapter 3 is subsequently devoted to the
 noun phrase, the pronoun phrase, the adverb phrase, the
 adjective phrase and the extension of the first two of them
 by means of determiners. It deals as well with
 nominalizations, clause constituents of clauses (infinitive
 clauses, that-clauses, etc.) and prepositional phrases.
 Chapter 4, as we already pointed out above in this message,
 deals with the necessary adjustments made in the formal
 structures described before ir order to integrate the
 phrase-level grammar in different environments of
 application, these adjustments concern primarily the
 treatment of ambiguity in the grammar.

 The book can be ordered from:

 Servicio de Publicaci�ns e Intercambio Cient�fico
 Campus universitario sur / E-15782 Santiago de Compostela
 Phone: +34 981 593500 / Fax: +34 981 593963
 e-mail: spublicusc.es
 URL:http://www.usc.es/spubl

 Paperback: ISBN 84-8121-851-0, pages: 441, price:
 Spain: 25.24 Euros (VAT included)
 Foreign countries: 24.27 Euros (+ 3.85)
 COMMENT: 15% off for institutions