As we announced in an earlier message, Chit-Fung Lam (Lawrence), Elaine Ui Dhonnchadha, and I are planning to revive the f-structure comparison sessions that were held in the regular meetings of the ParGram consortium (https://pargram.w.uib.no/). These meetings will be held on-line, and anyone who is developing a grammar using the XLE grammar development platform (https://ling.sprachwiss.uni-konstanz.de/pages/xle/) is welcome to attend. We would also welcome participation by anyone using the Grammar Writer's Workbench (https://parc-public.pages-external.parc.com/xle/isl/groups/nltt/medley/).
In these meetings, we will discuss and compare f-structures for a parallel set of translationally equivalent sentences. We will use the Pargram treebank sentences as a starting point. The Pargram treebank is available at the following link (scroll to the end of the page):
https://clarino.uib.no/iness/treebanks?collection=ParGram&reset-all=true
We will discuss the f-structures for the following sentences (we may not have time for a discussion of all of them -- it is fine to attend the meeting even if your grammar does not parse all of these):
The driver starts the tractor.
The tractor is red.
What did the farmer see?
Did the farmer sell his tractor?
Push the button.
All participants will translate these sentences into the language they are working on, and produce and print out the f-structures to PDF. There is no need to print out c-structures. We have created a Google Drive directory for the f-structures, which currently contains f-structures for English and Irish. In advance of the meeting, meeting participants should plan to deposit their f-structures there for as many of the sentences as you can parse. Please contact one of us if you would like to have access to this repository.
Please try to model your f-structures on the analyses in the treebank to the extent possible. In the Pargram consortium, the idea is that differences in f-structures for translational equivalents should reflect syntactic differences between the languages -- there should be no arbitrary differences to do with spelling of feature names or other linguistically irrelevant details.
Unfortunately, there is a conflict with the originally proposed meeting time next Tuesday (24 Oct) therefore the meeting has been rescheduled to Tuesday 21 November at 9:00 AM UTC (this is 9:00 AM UK time).
The Zoom link is below. If you have any questions, or if you would like to be added to the list of people with access to the f-structure repository, please send email to one of us. We are looking forward to discussing your f-structures!
- Mary, Lawrence and Elaine
PARGRAM Treebank
https://tcd-ie.zoom.us/j/93770084827?pwd=OEpZampzanZMS2VXMDNkcEJyTU9WZz09
Meeting ID: 937 7008 4827
Passcode: 111795