GF Russian Resource Library
Janna Khegai, Aarne Ranta · Chalmers Publication Library (Chalmers University of Technology) · 2006
Adjective = Cat ** {...} abstract Noun = Cat ** {...} abstract Verb = Cat ** {...} 2.5 Top-level grammar and lexicon The module Grammar collects all the category-specific modules into a complete grammar: abstract Grammar = Adjective, Noun, Verb, ..., Structural, IdiomGrammar = Adjective, Noun, Verb, ..., Structural, Idiom The module Structural is a lexicon of structural words (function words), such as determiners. The module Idiom is a collection of idiomatic structures whose implementation is very language-dependent. An example is existential structures (”there is”, ”es gibt”, ”il y a”, etc). The module Lang combines Grammar with a Lexicon of ca. 350 content words: abstract Lang = Grammar, LexiconLang = Grammar, Lexicon Using Lang instead of Grammar as a library may give for free some words needed in an application. But its main purpose is to help testing the resource library, rather than as a resource itself. It does not even seem realistic to develop a general-purpose multilingual resource lexicon. 2.6 Language-specific syntactic structures The API collected in Grammar has been designed to be implementable for all languages in the resource package. It does contain some rules that are strange or superfluous in some languages; for instance, the distinction between definite and indefinite articles does not apply to Finnish and Russian. But such rules are still easy to implement: they only create some superfluous ambiguity in the languages in question. But the library makes no claim that all languages should have exactly the same abstract syntax. The common API is therefore extended by language-dependent rules. The top level of each languages looks as follows (with English as example): abstract English = Grammar, ExtraEngAbs, DictEngAbsEnglish = Grammar, ExtraEngAbs, DictEngAbs