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University of Oxford
Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics

Verb-initial grammars: A multilingual/parallel perspective

Participants Oxford University, Centre for Linguistics and Philology:
Mary Dalrymple, Charles Randriamasimanana

University of Essex, Department of Linguistics
Louisa Sadler, Ingo Mittendorf

Objectives This project, which ran from April 2004 to May 2007, developed broad-coverage computational lexicons and grammars for two verb-initial languages, Welsh (Celtic) at the University of Essex, and Malagasy (Austronesian) at Oxford University. The project was a part of PARGRAM, a collaborative project to develop computational grammars within a shared linguistic framework and based on common linguistic assumptions.

The syntactic framework of reference for PARGRAM is the highly stable and mathematically well-understood theory of Lexical Functional Grammar, a constraint-based theory of linguistic structure.

Participants use the XLE grammar development platform, an efficient and powerful system developed and maintained at the Palo Alto Research Center in California, which faithfully implements LFG theory.

Details of the grant can be found on the ESRC Society Today web site.

You can try out the Malagasy and Welsh grammars at the University of Bergen's XLE Web Interface site.

Data and resources for Malagasy can be found here.

Data and resources for Welsh can be found here.