Article published in:
Verb Phrase and Fluid Construction Grammar
Edited by Luc Steels and Katrien Beuls
[Constructions and Frames 9:2] 2017
► pp. 226–250

Robust processing of the Dutch verb phrase

| AI Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

The Dutch verb phrase (VP) is notorious for its syntactic intricacies. There are three main reasons why it is difficult to robustly handle its complexity in a processing model. First of all, a single VP can contain multiple modal auxiliaries (‘modal stacking’). Second, perfect auxiliaries can not only take a past participle as their argument but also a modal auxiliary in the infinitive form. Finally, there are various word orders in which the verb forms can appear. The first part of this paper presents a fully operational precision processing model of the Dutch VP in Fluid Construction Grammar. The model shows that the aforementioned challenges can be overcome by carefully managing the hierarchical relations between the elements of the VP. The second part introduces a robust comprehension method, which can process VPs containing morphological and word order errors. This method allows in many cases to recover the intended meaning of an erroneous VP, as well as to correct its form, using a strategy that exploits the deep semantic analyses and the bidirectional nature of the model.

Keywords: Construction Grammar, Dutch verb phrase, robustness, Fluid Construction Grammar, language comprehension, language production, bidirectionality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A meaning representation for the Dutch VP
  • 3.A bidirectional grammar of the Dutch VP
    • 3.1The grammar explicated
    • 3.2The grammar at work
    • 3.3Handling the syntactic intricacies of the Dutch VP
      • Modal stacking
      • Perfect auxiliaries
      • Word order variation
  • 4A robust comprehension method
    • 4.1The robust comprehension algorithm
    • 4.2An example of robust comprehension
    • 4.3A first validation
  • 5.Further research
  • 6. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 December 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.00003.van
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