Excursions into Syntactic Databases /
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This book is about syntactic databases (a.k.a. treebanks), collections of text material in which the syntactic relations have been made visible. It starts off with a general intro-duction to the subject and then continues with three in-depth investigations of more specialized aspects. In the introduction, syntactic databases are first placed in the larger context of linguistic databases , text collections with a broader linguistic annotation than just a syntactic one. Then some examples of syntactic databases are given, illustrating the range of annotation actually encountered. The introduction is completed with an investigation of database management systems for syntactic databases. The first in-depth investigation concerns the treatment of ambiguous structures in syntactic analysis trees, focussing on a very efficient representation for such structures and the means to create this representation. Next, classroom use of syntactic databases is examined. A computer program for this purpose, CLUES, is discussed, along with a suggested series of syntax exercises. The final subject is the importance of including function and attribute information in the annotation of texts. The central line of investigation here is a probabilistic parsing experiment in which the use of function and attribute information is the main variable.
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1 online resource (192 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004657328
Sentence types and word-order patterns in written Arabic : medieval and modern perspectives /
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Sentence types and word-order patterns in Arabic have been a matter of debate and controversy for a long period of time. They were hotly discussed by the medieval Arab grammarians and continue to be a major topic of discussion among modern scholars. This book describes the development of the medieval grammarians' theory of sentence types; a development from the theory of 'amal , which lies at the heart of medieval Arabic grammatical tradition. Each major topic is discussed with a view to explore the basic principles underlying the medieval grammarians' arguments. Special attention is given to conceptual problems arising from conflicts with the theory of 'amal . This is followed by an assessment of the contributions made by modern scholars to the analysis and description of the constructions involved. Modern Arabists and linguists are shown to have concentrated on word-order patterns rather than on sentence types, placing special emphasis on the functional aspects of word order variations in Arabic.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [229]-235) and index. :
9789047412120 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.