Syntactic analyses for parallel grammars

Abstract

This paper focuses on two disparate aspects of German syntax from the perspective of parallel grammar development. As part of a cooperative project, we present an innovative approach to auxiliaries and multiple genitive NPs in German. The LFG-based implementation presented here avoids unnessary structural complexity in the representation of auxiliaries by challenging the traditional analysis of auxiliaries as raising verbs. The approach developed for multiple genitive NPs provides a more abstract, language independent representation of genitives associated with nominalized verbs. Taken together, the two approaches represent a step towards providing uniformly applicable treatments for differing languages, thus lightening the burden for machine translation.