Hi!

Discussing the problem with Tracy H. King, I've found a solution, correcting the DP rule thus:

DP --> { Dbar[art] | Dbar[pron] }.  


These alternatives don't work:

"DP --> Dbar[_type]." 

   

"DP --> Dbar." 

   "DP --> Dbar[]." 

The rest of the grammar and the lexical rules were correct. This variant, declaring the possible values for the _type variable on the left hand side of the rule, also has worked:

Dbar[_type $ {art pron}] --> { D[_type]: _type=art  ^=! ; NP: ^=! "COMMENT{EX RULES DP: os brasileiros}"
   | D[_type]: _type=pron ^=! ; { NP "COMMENT{EX RULES DP: nós brasileiros}" | e: (^ PRED)='pro' "COMMENT{EX RULES DP: nós}" } 
 }.

Best,
Leonel
----------------------------------------------
Prof. Dr. Leonel Figueiredo de Alencar 
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures /
Linguistics Master's & PhD Program
Research Group on Language and Computation
Federal University of Ceará




On 12-Feb-18, at 1:05 PM, Leonel F. de Alencar wrote:

Hi everybody!

I'd like to implement complex categories in my Brazilian Portuguese 
LFG/XLE grammar. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any toy grammar with 
this feature to guide my first steps.
Following Butt et. al. (1999:192) and Stefanie Dipper's dissertation 
from 2003, I've tried to implement the attached toy DP grammar using 
complex categories, but none of the grammatical examples in the 
testfile.lfg are parsed. Could someone explain to me where I'm wrong 
and possibly correct the grammar so that these examples are parsed?
Just for the sake of learning how to deal with complex categories, 
I've assumed that DPs like "we Brazilians" are headed by the personal 
pronoun (i.e. D[pron]). In the case of D[pron], NP is optional. With 
an article as head (i.e. D[art]), however, NP is obligatory.
Many thanks in advance.
Best,
Leonel


----------------------------------------------
Prof. Dr. Leonel Figueiredo de Alencar
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures /
Linguistics Master's & PhD Program
Federal University of Ceará
http://complin.blogspot.com.br
leonel.de.alencar@ufc.br

<testfile.lfg><toy-portuguese.lfg>