Eckhard Bick - VISL

Methodologically, it is commonly claimed that the Constraint Grammar
concept is robust as a parsing technique (among other things, because one reading
always survives disambiguation). In addition, I would like to claim that Constraint
Grammar, as it is practised by its present research community, is also quite robust as
a grammatical system.
First, Constraint Grammars are written in a corpus based environment with
“quantitative” control. The process of writing and rewriting rules on the background
of constantly reiterated corpus-performance-checks ensures that a Constraint
Grammar remains close to “real” language, confronting every conceivable niche of
syntactic variation, derivational productivity etc. A CG system is at no stage
sheltered by a “toy lexicon” or a “laboratory grammar”.
Second, I have illustrated that word and tag based flat dependency grammar,
while being a robust starting point for transformations into other grammatical
systems, also has notational robustness advantages in its own right: As such, CGstyle
dependency notation is a more robust system of syntax than a constituent tree
analysis, since certain attachment ambiguities (for instance, co-ordination and PPattachment)
are left underspecified at the syntactic level, whereas constituent
analysis forces distinctions that often are not meaningful except on the perceptual,
humanly contextualised, level.
Third, a grammatical description handled and implemented by a CG parser, is
in its very nature empirical in a unique way, ensuring a valuable and interesting kind
of authenticity. Since new sets and secondary tags are introduced into the grammar
along the way, corpus data and corpus “needs” are allowed to actually shape the
grammar itself. This is entirely different from the purely statistical, lexicographic
and stylistic uses ordinarily made of corpora. For instance, the category of
“cognitive verb” ( 253 , as a hybrid syntactic category with semantic
interpretation) was added along the way, growing from the disambiguational need to
tag for a valency selection restriction concerning direct object que-clauses (thatclauses).
Likewise, the category of “ergative verb” was not defined a-priori, but
derived from corpus cases where verbs are particularly likely to precede their subject
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