A Grammar for Finnish Discourse Patterns

This article deals with Finnish discourse oriented word-order variations, and provides their implementation in the HPSG-style typed feature structure grammar using the LKB toolkit (Copestake, 2002). It does not present a full-coverage Finnish grammar or even a small HPSG fragment of the standard syntactic phenomena in Finnish. Rather, the aim has been to implement the Finnish discourse configuration in the Finnish Discourse Pattern Grammar (FDPG), employing typed feature structures and old and new discourse information, and thus to supply a starting point for further research in computational modelling of syntax-discourse interplay. The goal is motivated by the need for a dialogue system to analyse utterances and generate responses using semantic representation which is rich enough to encode discourse referents with different information status. The dialogue manager distinguishes old and new information, keeps track of the discourse topic, and also provides a context e.g. for the specific corrections where the speaker objects what has been stated in the previous utterance and contrasts it with a new fact. The use of topic and new information in language generation is discussed in Jokinen and Wilcock (2003) in more detail. The interpretation of the Finnish word-order variations is based on Vilkuna (1989). She points out that the different syntactic orders reflect a discourse configurational structure of the language: constituents in certain positions are always interpreted as conveying particular discourse functions. In order to parse the word-order variations in the HPSG grammar formalism, I will argue