Dear Colleagues, I’ve never developed an XLE grammar, but I have worked on several grammars using XLFG(*), and my analysis of these sentences might not be especially interesting, but could at least spark your curiosity. I put these examples together quite quickly this morning. (*) Just a quick reminder: XLFG is an online tool I developed for building small-scale grammars, aimed at teaching and exploring LFG. I won’t be able to attend this meeting, but if you’re interested in taking a look, here are the analyses I’ve come up with. There are several important differences between the analyses typically done in Pargram and those I produce using XLFG. The only point of this message is to point them out. I'm not claiming to be right, and I can’t really present a full argument in such a short message. At best, it might trigger some discussion or, as I said, curiosity. Here are three first differences I’ve observed in the analysis of the given sentences: a) I treat compound nouns such as ice-cream, wine bottle, book cover as fully grammaticalized lexical units. I reject any semantic compositionality of such sequences in synchrony, though I of course accept their compositional nature diachronically. This is not something that appears explicitly in my XLFG analysis. In my view, ice-cream, wine bottle and book cover are just regular common nouns without any modifiers. b) I treat the verb-particle construction as a predicative composition. There’s nothing particularly different here with Pargram, except that my lexicon includes specific entries for phrasal verbs with their own subcategorization patterns (e.g. "sweep up" is always transitive, while "sweep" is not necessarily.) and a few additional aspectual or semantic features that aren’t present in the base verb alone (sweep up/away/out, etc.) up part [PRED: '-_UP', part_form: 'up']; swept v [PRED: 'TO_SWEEP <SUBJ.agent, (OBJ.patient)>’, TENSED:+, MOOD:INDICATIVE, TENSE:PAST]; # TO_SWEEP_UP [PRED:'<SUBJ.agent, OBJ.patient>', ASPECT:TELIC]; c) I treat the verb let as a presentative verb that participates in the verbal construction of an imperative, rather than as the syntactic head of the f-structure. So, here are the analyses I obtain using XLFG and a sample grammar for these sentences: 38. The book cover depicted a tractor.   39. Let's get ice-cream.   40. The boy swept up the broken wine bottle.  Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about these examples Kind regards Lionel Clément
On 3 Aug 2025, at 12:09, Chit Fung LAM (Lawrence) <cflamlawrence@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Colleagues,
Our next LFG f-structure workshop will be held online on Thursday, 14 August 2025, from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM UTC+0 (5 PM to 7 PM in the UK, 6 PM to 8 PM in Central Europe, 9 AM to 11 AM in California).
The meeting will consist of two parts. In the first half, we will discuss any issues of linguistic analysis and/or technical XLE issues in relation to computational grammars under development by participants. If you are developing an XLE grammar and are having any issues with XLE or your grammar, you can discuss these issues in the first half of the meeting. In the second half, depending on how much time is remaining, we will continue the comparison of f-structures for translational equivalents of the following sentences:
38. The book cover depicted a tractor. 39. Let's get ice-cream. 40. The boy swept up the broken wine bottle.
The f-structures for the English versions of these sentences are available on the INESS page (see below) for this meeting series. Even if your grammar cannot analyse the translational equivalents of these sentences, you are welcome to attend the first half of the meeting and receive comments on your computational grammar and the structures that it produces, and you are also welcome to attend the second half to participate in the discussion of these sentences for those grammars which can analyse them.
Best, Mary, Lawrence, Elaine
*Zoom Meeting*
Join Zoom Meeting
https://tcd-ie.zoom.us/j/92690283651?pwd=VXdOWjczaWtUYXM3cklvZC8rVlFuZz09
Meeting ID: 926 9028 3651
Passcode: 801772
From Beginners to Experts, all are Welcome!
We look forward to seeing you online soon.
- Mary Dalrymple, Lawrence (Chit-Fung) Lam, and Elaine Ui Dhonnchadha
Please refer to the message below for further details about the f-structure comparison meetings. Thank you!
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As we announced in an earlier message, Chit-Fung Lam (Lawrence), Elaine Ui Dhonnchadha, and Mary Dalrymple have revived the f-structure comparison sessions that were held in the regular meetings of the ParGram consortium (https://pargram.w.uib.no/). These meetings are held on-line, and anyone who is developing a grammar using the XLE grammar development platform (https://ling.sprachwiss.uni-konstanz.de/pages/xle/) is welcome to attend. We would also welcome participation by anyone using the Grammar Writer's Workbench ( https://parc-public.pages-external.parc.com/xle/isl/groups/nltt/medley/).
The first half of these meetings will consist of a discussion of general issues in grammar development and specific issues in the grammars and analyses that participants are working on. Please bring your questions and issues with your grammar and the XLE to this part of the meeting. In the second half of these meetings, we will discuss and compare f-structures for a parallel set of translationally equivalent sentences, using the Pargram treebank sentences as a starting point. The Pargram treebank is available at the following link (scroll to the end of the page):
https://clarino.uib.no/iness/treebanks?collection=ParGram&reset-all=true
We will discuss the f-structures for the current sentences (we may not have time for a discussion of all of them). You are welcome to attend the second half of the meeting even if your grammar does not parse the translational equivalent of these sentences.
In preparation for the discussion in the second half of the meeting, participants will translate these sentences into the language they are working on, and produce and print out the f-structures to PDF. There is no need to print out c-structures. We have created a Google Drive directory for the f-structures, which currently contains f-structures for Irish, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Welsh, etc. In advance of the meeting, meeting participants should plan to deposit their f-structures there for as many of the sentences as you can parse. Please contact one of us if you would like to have access to this repository.
If you have any questions, or if you would like to be added to the list of people with access to the f-structure repository, please send an email to one of us. We are looking forward to discussing your f-structures!
- Mary Dalrymple, Lawrence (Chit-Fung) Lam, and Elaine Ui Dhonnchadha
