From IGT to precision grammar: French verbal morphology

Interlinear glossed text (IGT, the familiar three-line format of linguistic examples) can be an extremely rich source of linguistic information, when linguists follow best practices in creating it (e.g., the Leipzig glossing rules, Comrie et al. 2003). The ODIN project (http://www.csufresno.edu/odin; Lewis 2006) recognized the value of IGT data as a reusable data type and has created a searchable IGT database. This paper represents early efforts in a project to combine aggregations of IGT with a second source of linguistic knowledge to automatically produce implemented formal grammars. The second source of linguistic knowledge is the LinGO Grammar Matrix customization system (Bender et al. 2010). The Grammar Matrix is a multilingual grammar engineering project which includes a cross-linguistic core HPSG (Pollard and Sag 1994) grammar and a set of analyses for cross-linguistically variable phenomena which can be selected via a web-based questionnaire. As an initial pilot study, we focus on verb morphology (including morphotactics and the morphosyntactic effects of affixes) and we begin with a best-case scenario: For our IGT, we use the complete paradigm for the French verb faire (‘to do/make’) provided by Olivier Bonami (pc), including 15,658 phonologically transcribed, morphologically segmented and glossed verb forms.