Book Reviews A Grammar Writer's Cookbook

Grammar writers sometimes approach g rammar writ ing as if the language being described were the only language in the world. In contrast, this book reports on the parallel deve lopment of computat ional grammars for three languages: English, French, and German. At the time the book was written, the "ParGram" (Parallel Grammars) project included researchers f rom the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (California), the Xerox Research Centre Europe (Grenoble), and the Institut ffir Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung (University of Stuttgart). The theoretical approach is Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), a theory well suited to parallel development , in that it assumes two levels of grammatical representation: 1 "c(onsti tuent)-structure" is the traditional phrase-structure analysis, while "f(unctional)-structure" is a representat ion of a rgument structure (a surfacy kind of semantic representation). While the c-structures of analogous sentences in two languages may differ substantially, it is possible to analyze their f-structures as being much more parallel. For example, while languages may make more or less the same tense /aspec t distinctions, they may differ in whether those distinctions are encoded in auxiliary verbs or in affixes. While such languages necessarily differ in their c-structure, it is possible to collapse those differences in f-structure by treating tense and aspect as morphosyntact ic features rather than as lexical items or affixes. Of course, not all differences be tween two languages can be collapsed at f-structure. English, French, and German, for example, differ in some of the propert ies of tense