Resemblances between Meaning-Text Theory and Functional Generative Description Zdeněk Žabokrtský Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics Charles University, Prague

Functional Generative Description developed in Prague since mid 60’s (Sgall,1967) sharing most of the „peculiarities of the MTM“ ( Bolshakov and Gebulkh,2000): –“multilevel character of the model” –“orientation to synthesis” –“distinguishing deep and surface syntactic representation” –“accounting of communicative structure” –“orientation to languages of a type different from English” –“labeling syntactic relations between words” –“keeping traditions and terminology of classical linguistics”

Levels of representation in MTT and FGD semantic deep-syntactic surface-syntactic deep-morphological surface-morphological deep-phonological surface-phonological tectogrammatical surface-syntactic morphological morphonological phonetic

DSyntR vs. tectogrammatics in both –skelet of the representation – dependency tree (plus non- tree relations of co-reference) –nodes ~ semantically full lexemes –inflectional meanings: grammemes/grammatemes –ficitious lexemes –valency: actants vs. circumstantials in DSyntR –DSynt prosodic structure in TGTS –semantically motivated inventory of dependency relations, so called functors (ACT, PAT, ADDR, ORIG, EFF, CAUS, DIR?, LOC, TWHEN, CAUS, BEN...)

Side remark: re-inventing the DSyntR/TGTS in PropBank (1)2002 – annotated propositions: only verbs and their arguments (2)adding ‘modifiers of event variables’ (3)adding arguments of nouns (4)adding discourse connectives

FGD implementation: Prague Dependency Treebank long-term research project aimed at creating a syntactically annotated corpus based on the framework of FGD since 1995, inspired by Penn Treebank manually annotated Czech newspaper texts layered annotation scheme PDT 1.0 released in 2001 (distributed by LDC) PDT 2.0 to appear in 2006

Layered annotation scenario of PDT layers of annotation –t-layer - tectogrammatical layer –a-layer – analytical layer –m-layer – morphological layer original text –w-layer – original sentence

m-layer sample (Some contours of the problem seem to be clearer after the resurgence by Havel's speech.)

a-layer sample

t-layer sample

Coordination in dependency trees in PDT physically still a tree structure, but tree edges do not always directly correspond to dependencies the real dependency and coordination relations can be (deterministically) derived by edge composition direct vs. effective parent/children

PDT 2.0 – amount of the data

Summary FGD – similar to MTT in several aspects PDT – implementation of FGD framework on a large data