Book Reviews: Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar and German in Head-driven Phrase-structure Grammar

It has been almost ten years since the classic Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (Gazdar, Klein, Pullum, and Sag 1985) appeared. And like its predecessor, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar will probably become a classic too. Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) is the state of the art in what Pullum and Zwicky (1991) have called category-based syntax, and this book makes available to a wide audience recent developments in a grammatical framework used extensively in syntactically oriented research in natural language processing. Moreover, of the grammatical theories using inheritance-based grammars, a widespread tradition in the NLP community, HPSG achieves the widest coverage (vide the special issues of Computational Linguistics devoted to this topic in 1992). The book thus gives the computational linguist a good idea of how to apply the basic knowledge-representation ideas of inheritance and typing to state-of-the-art linguistic analyses. It also complements the more theoretically oriented works of Carpenter (1992) and Keller (1993) on typed-feature structures and their logic. So, although its intended audience is clearly primarily linguists, this book is essential