Practical Grammar 12
Final Project
In your final class project, your task is to write a grammar for the English auxiliary system.
Exercise 12.1
1. Go to https://xlfg.labri.fr/ and log in.
2. Open the grammar Practical Grammar Final Project.
3. Parse the whole test suite.
4. At this point, none of the grammatical sentences parse.
5. Your task is to make the grammar accept all the grammatical sentences in the test suite while excluding the ungrammatical ones.
6. To achieve this, you will need to add phrase structure rules and lexical entries.
Goals
In what follows, you will find the argument structure representations of some of the test sentences that your grammar should produce.
(1) Fred will buy olives.
(2) Fred has bought olives.
(3) Fred is buying olives.
(4) Fred will have bought olives.
(5) Fred has been buying olives.
(6) Fred will have been buying olives.
(7) Fred had bought olives.
(8) Fred was buying olives.
(9) It will rain.
(10) It will have been raining.
Hints
1. Add only those rules and lexical entries which are necessary for the test sentences.
2. Give finite auxiliaries the cagegory I and non-finite ones the category V.
3. Make use of the following features and their values:
a. TNS: PRES, PAST, FUT b. VFORM: FIN, INF, PRESP, PASTP
4. Assume that the VP following each auxiliary bears the grammatical function XCOMP.
5. Every IP/VP has at most a single auxiliary daughter.
6. As long as you get a well formed f-structure, ignore the "Extended Coherence" message!