A Syntactic Description Of German In A Formalism Designed For Machine Translation


This paper presents a syntactic description of a fragment of German that has been worked out within the machine translation project Eurotra. It represents the syntactic part of the German module of this multilingual translation system. The linguistic tool for the following analyses is the so-called CAT-frame work. In the first two sections of this paper an introduction of the formalism and a linguistic characterization of the framework is given. The CAT formalism as a whole is a theory of machine translation, the syntactic analysis part which is the subject of this paper is an LFG-like mapping of a constituent structure onto a functional structure. A third section develops principles for a phrase structure and a functional structure for German and the mapping of phrase structure onto functional structure. In a fourth section a treatment of unbounded movement phenomena is sketched. As the CAT-framework does not provide any global mechanisms I try to give a local treatment of this problem.