Skip to main content

Building a Formal Grammar for a Polysynthetic Language

  • Conference paper

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7395))

Abstract

We present the results of a project of building a lexical-functional grammar of Aymara, an Amerindian language. There was almost no research on Aymara in computational linguistics to date. The goal of the project is twofold: First, we want to provide a formal description of the language. Second, NLP resources (lexicon and grammar) are being developed that could be used in machine translation and other NLP tasks. The paper presents formal description of selected properties of Aymara which are uncommon in well-researched Western languages. Furthermore, we present an abstract linguistic representation in the LFG framework which is less language specific than f-structures.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Adelaar, W.: The Languages of the Andes. Cambridge University Press (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Beesley, K.R.: Finite-state Morphological Analysis and Generation for Aymara. In: Proceedings of the Global Symposium on Promoting the Multilingual Internet (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Bresnan, J.: Lexical-Functional Syntax. Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics, New York (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Briggs, L.T.: Dialectal Variation in the Aymara Language of Bolivia and Peru. Ph.D. thesis. University of Florida (1976)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Butt, M., King, T.H., Niño, M.E., Segond, F.: A Grammar Writer’s Cookbook. CSLI Publications (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Cerrón-Palomino, R., Carvajal, J.C.: Aimara. In: Crevels, M., Muysken, P. (eds.) Lenguas de Bolivia. Plural Editores, La Paz, Bolivia (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Forssman, B.: Lettische Grammatik. Verlag J.H. Roell, Dettelbach (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Guzmán de Rojas, I.: ATAMIRI — interlingual MT using the Aymara language. In: New Directions in Machine Translation (1988)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Guzmán de Rojas, I.: El Software de Traducción Multilingüe ATAMIRI. In: Proceedings of the VII Simposio Ibero-Americano de Terminologia e Indústrias da Língua (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Guzmán de Rojas, I.: Experience with language implementations in ATAMIRI. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Bolivian & Rhondonian Languages (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Hale, K.L.: Warlpiri and the grammar of non-configurational languages. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 1, 5–47 (1983)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Hardman, M., Vásquez, J., de Dios, J.Y.: Aymara. Compendio de estructura fonológica y gramatical. Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Heine, B., Kuteva, T.: World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge University Press (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Ishikawa, A.: Complex Predicates and Lexical Operations in Japanese. Ph.D. thesis. Stanford University (1985)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Kaplan, R.M., Bresnan, J.: Lexical-Functional Grammar: A formal system for grammatical representation. In: Bresnan, J. (ed.) Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations. MIT Press, Cambridge (1982)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Kaplan, R.M., Netter, K., Wedekind, J., Zaenen, A.: Translation By Structural Correspondences. In: Proceedings of 4th EACL, pp. 272–281 (1989)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Kaplan, R.M., Wedekind, J.: LFG Generation Produces Context-free Languages. In: Proceedings of COLING 2000, Saarbrücken (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  18. King, T.H.: Focus Domains and Information Structure. In: Butt, M., King, T.H. (eds.) Proceedings of the LFG Conference (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Kroeger, P.R.: Analyzing Syntax. Cambridge University Press (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Kruijff, G.K.: A Dependency-based Grammar. Tech. rep. Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Sadler, L., Crookston, I., Arnold, D., Way, A.: LFG and Translation. University of Texas at Austin, pp. 11–13. LRC (1990)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Sadler, L., Thompson, H.S.: Structural Non-Correspondence In Translation. In: Proceedings of the 5th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 293–298 (1991)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Sgall, P., Hajičová, E., Panevová, J.: The Meaning of the Sentence in Its Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects. D. Reider Publishing Company (1986)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Wong, S.H.S., Hancox, P.: An Investigation into the Use of Argument Structure and Lexical Mapping Theory for Machine Translation. In: Proceedings of the 12th Pacific Asia Conference on Linguistics, Information and Computation, Singapore (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Žabokrtský, Z., Ptáček, J., Pajas, P.: TectoMT: Highly Modular MT System with Tectogrammatics Used as Transfer Layer. In: ACL 2008 WMT: Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, pp. 167–170. Association for Computational Linguistics, Columbus (2008)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Homola, P. (2012). Building a Formal Grammar for a Polysynthetic Language. In: de Groote, P., Nederhof, MJ. (eds) Formal Grammar. FG FG 2010 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7395. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32024-8_15

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32024-8_15

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-32023-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-32024-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics