An Attribute-Grammar Implementation of Government-binding Theory

The syntactic analysis of languages with respect to Government-binding (GB) grammar is a problem that has received relatively little attention until recently. This paper describes an attribute grammar specification of the Government-binding theory. The paper focuses on the description of the attribution rules responsible for determining antecedent-trace relations in phrase-structure trees, and on some theoretical implications of those rules for the GB model. The specification relies on a transformation-lem variant of Government-binding theory, briefly discussed by Chomsky (1981), in which the rule move-a is replaced by an interpretive rule. Here the interpretive rule is specified by means of attribution rules. The attribute grammar is currently being used to write an English parser which embodies the principles of GB theory. The parsing strategy and attribute evaluation scheme are cursorily described at the end of the paper.