An ontology of systematic relations for a shared grammar of Slavic

Abstract

Sharing portions of grammars across languages greatly reduces the costs of nutltilingual grammar engineering. Related languages share a ntuch wider range of linguistic itff'ornuttio;t than typically assunwd in stamlard mttltilingttal gramtmtr atwhitectures. Taking grammatical relatedness seriously, we are particularly interested in designing lhtguistically motivated grammatical resottrces Jbr Slavic languages to be used itz applied and theoretical computational linguistics, ht order to gain the pelwpective of a language-family oriented gramntar desigtl, we consider {ttt arrtly of systematic relations that can hold between syntactical units. While the categorisation of primitive linguistic entities tends to be language-specilic or even constrttction-.~pecific, the relations holding between them allow viii'lofts degrees of absltztction. On the basis of Slavic &tta, we show how a domain ontology conceptualising molphosyntaclic "buildiltg blocks" can serve as a basis r~" a shared grotlt;nar of Slavic.

Clitics in the Slavic languages

“…Similar ideas survive, in part, in some recent analyses like Avgustinova (1994), where the author assumes the existence of "pro-/enclitics proper". This is reflected in the almost exclusive use of the terms 'proclitic' and 'enclitic', and not just 'clitic' which represents a more recent terminology.…”

“…17. This is in contrast with Avgustinova (1994) who suggests that the "clause-initial restriction" is actually the driving force behind the options for clitic placement. Dimitrova-Vulchanova (1995).…”

“…Thus clitic clustering represents strong counterevidence to Avgustinova's (1994) assumption that Bulgarian clitics are not sentential clitics proper, but belong to "the verbal complex". sum (Aux), a question operator and Argument structure.…”

A functional typology of copular "be": Towards an HPSG formalisation

“…Following the approach in (Avgustinova and Uszkoreit 2003), where different types of constructions containing non-verbal predicates are classified on the basis of the relational ontology of (Avgustinova and Uszkoreit 2000), we present a typology of copula for Russian and show how the corresponding semantics can be encoded in the HPSG framework. As the analysed constructs differ in their syntactic (e.g., case marking of arguments) and semantic properties, these differences can now be made explicit and linked to the proposed classification.…”