Eckhard Bick - VISL

4
The syntactic level:
A dependency description of Portuguese
4.1 Flat functional dependency grammar
4.1.1 Dependency markers and function tags:
Syntactic form and function
In its essence, CG embraces a robust disambiguating philosophy, which does not build a
specific sentence structure, but carves away what cannot be part of any structure. That
way neither the carving method (rule system) nor the carving tools (rule compilers) are
determined by the Constraint Grammar idea as such. And even less the finished
sculpture. Every carpenter is free to apply his own beauty ideals. Or isn’t he? Which
kind of Constraint Grammar should he choose?
Historically, CG has its roots in morphological analysis, most systems run with a
two-level morphological analyser (TWOL) as preprocessor, and focus on morphological
features and parts of speech. Therefore, information is traditionally word-bound and
coded as tags (to be attached to words). “Flat” grammar is a natural consequence of this,
and my parser, too, makes use of a "flat" representation of syntactic structure.
The description contains information about both syntactic function (e.g.,
arguments like @SUBJ, @ACC) and constituent structure (syntactic form). The latter is
expressed by so-called dependency markers () which point towards the head of the
syntactic unit concerned, assembling the constituent into a coherent whole, with implicit
constituent borders. Where the head is not the main verb, it will be marked at the arrow
point (e.g., N for nominal head, A for adject-head 127 ). If there is a function tag (e.g.,
@, @N