Construction of an HPSG Grammar for the Arabic Relative Sentences

The paper proposes a treatment of relative sentences within the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Relative sentences are considered as a rather delicate linguistic phenomenon and not explored enough by Arabic researchers. In an attempt to deal with this phenomenon, we propose in this paper a study about different forms of relative clauses and the interaction of relatives with other linguistic phenomena such as ellipsis and coordination. In addition, in this paper we shed light on the recursion in Arabic relative sentences which makes this phenomenon more delicate in its treatment. This study will be used for the construction of an HPSG grammar that can process relative sentences. The HPSG formalism is based on two fundamental components: features and AVM (AttributeValue-Matrix). In fact, an adaptation of HPSG for the Arabic language is made here in order to integrate features and rules of the Arabic language. The established HPSG grammar is specified in TDL (Type Description Language). This specification is used by the LKB platform (Linguistic Knowledge Building) in order to generate the parser.