Arguments desperately seeking Interpretation: Parsing German Infinitives

In this paper we present a GB-parsing system for German and in particular the system's strategy for argument interpretat ion, which copes with the difficulty that word order is relatively free in German and also that arguments can precede their predicate. In this latter case, the parser makes a provisional interpretation, which is checked when the argument structure of the predicate is available. Moreover, a strategy of argument transfer is used in eases of longdistance scrambling, according to which arguments and adjuncts are at tached to the domain of the coherent verb, ECM verb, or raising verb, and transferred to the infinitival complement for interpretation. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n Free word order languages raise difficulties for parsing systems based on phrase-structure rule grammars, where the constituents are ordered. Indeed, to list all the possible orders leads to an increase in the grammar size and a corresponding decrease in performance. There have been several approaches to this problem, notably those based on the ID/LP (immediate dominance/l inear precedence) grammars (eft Gazdar et al. 1985) or functional unification grammars (cf. Kart tunnen &: Kay 1985). Within the Government and Binding framework, Kashket (1991) presents a parser for Warlpiri, a non-configurational language, where word order and its variation depends mainly on case marking. Although German is a partially free word order language, we will assume that it has a fixed base word order, which is modified by a set of movement transformations. In this paper, we will present the argument interpretation strategy *Thanks to Scott Fergusson for comments. This work has been supported in part by a grant from the FNRS, grant no 11-33731.92 of our parser for German, which is able to handle the difficulties arising from word order variations, focusing on the treatment of infinitival constructions. 1 2 T h e D I P S P a r s e r 2.1 G e n e r a l P r o p e r t i e s o f D I P S DIPS (Deutsches Interaktives Parsing System 'German Interactive Parsing System') is a largescale interactive GB-based 2 parsing system. Its architecture is basically similar to that of IPS (Wehrli 1992) and FIPS (Laenzhnger 8z Wehrli 1991). The parser produces a set of GB Sstructures (trees) from an input sentence. These structures are associated with information concerning traces, argument structure, and case features. The syntactic structure of constituents corresponds to the GB X-schema. We consider German to be an SOV-language (i.e. objects precede their predicates in their base position). Thus, the X-schema is parameterized in German as follows: The complement (Compl) precedes the head X ° for the categories V, A, I, whereas it follows the head for the categories C, D, P, N, Adv. 3 As the specifier (Spec) is always on the left, the Xschema has the structure given in (1). (1) XP --, Spec X -~ X ° Compl, if X ° : { C °, D O , po, N O '