Tree Wrapping for Role and Reference Grammar

Laura Kallmeyer, Rainer Osswald, Robert D. Van Valin Jr.

Abstract: We present a tree rewriting system that aims at formalizing the composition of syntactic templates in Role and Reference Grammar, a linguistic grammar developed mainly for typological analysis. Building on ideas from Tree Adjoining Grammar, we devise two basic operations for syntactic composition: (wrapping) substitution and sister adjunction. The first operation models plain argument insertion as well as the construction of long distance dependencies. The second operation implements adjunction to non-binary trees. We complement the definition of this tree rewriting system, called Tree Wrapping Grammar, by giving a CYK parser for grammars of this type.