A Swedish Clause Grammar And Its Implementation

The paper is concerned with the notion of clause as a basic, minimal unit for the segmentation and processing of natural language. The first part of the paper surveys various criteria for clausehood that have been proposed in theoretical linguistics and computational linguistics, cind pro­ poses that a clause in English or Swedish or any other natural language can be defined in structural terms at the surface level as a regular expression of syntactic categories, equivalently, as a set of sequences of word classes, a possibility which has been explicitly denied by Harris (1968) and later transformational grammarians. The second part of the paper presents a grammar for Swedish clauses, and a newspaper text segmented into clauses by an experimental clause parser intended for a speech synthesis applicar tion. The third part of the paper presents some phonetic data concerning the distribution of perceived pauses (Strangert and Zhi 1989, Strangert 1989) and intonation units (Huber 1988) in relation to clause units. 1 What is a Clause in Linguistic Theory? In trad ition a l gram m ar a clause is defined as a unit consisting o f a su b ject and a pred icate . T h e term s su ppositu m and appositu m were used in scholastic gram m ar to den ote the synttictic fu n ction s o f these tw o basic parts o f a clause. T rad itiona l gram m ar malces a d istin ction betw een m ain clauses and dependent clauses. In current tran sform ation al gram m ar as presented by R adford (1988 ), three typ es o f clauses are recogn ized (see (1 )). (1 ) (a ) O rd in ary Clauses S'