A Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar for English

This document describes a sizable grammar of English written in the TAG formalism and implemented for use with the XTAG system. This report and the grammar described herein supersedes the TAG grammar described in [XTAG-Group, 1995]. The English grammar described in this report is based on the TAG formalism developed in [Joshi et al., 1975], which has been extended to include lexicalization ([Schabes et al., 1988]), and unification-based feature structures ([Vijay-Shanker and Joshi, 1991]). The range of syntactic phenomena that can be handled is large and includes auxiliaries (including inversion), copula, raising and small clause constructions, topicalization, relative clauses, infinitives, gerunds, passives, adjuncts, it-clefts, wh-clefts, PRO constructions, noun-noun modifications, extraposition, determiner sequences, genitives, negation, noun-verb contractions, sentential adjuncts and imperatives. This technical report corresponds to the XTAG Release 8/31/98. The XTAG grammar is continuously updated with the addition of new analyses and modification of old ones, and an online version of this report can be found at the XTAG web page: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~xtag/. Acknowledgements We are immensely grateful to Aravind Joshi for supporting this project. The following people have contributed to the development of grammars in the project: Anne Abeille, Jason Baldridge, Rajesh Bhatt, Kathleen Bishop, Raman Chandrasekar, Sharon Cote, Beatrice Daille, Christine Doran, Dania Egedi, Tim Farrington, Jason Frank, Caroline Heycock, Beth Ann Hockey, Roumyana Izvorski, Karin Kipper, Daniel Karp, Seth Kulick, Young-Suk Lee, Heather Matayek, Patrick Martin, Megan Moser, Sabine Petillon, Rashmi Prasad, Laura Siegel, Yves Schabes, Victoria Tredinnick and Raffaella Zanuttini. The XTAG system has been developed by: Tilman Becker, Richard Billington, Andrew Chalnick, Dania Egedi, Devtosh Khare, Albert Lee, David Magerman, Alex Mallet, Patrick Paroubek, Rich Pito, Gilles Prigent, Carlos Prolo, Anoop Sarkar, Yves Schabes, William Schuler, B. Srinivas, Fei Xia, Yuji Yoshiie and Martin Zaidel. We would also like to thank Michael Hegarty, Lauri Karttunen, Anthony Kroch, Mitchell Marcus, Martha Palmer, Owen Rambow, Philip Resnik, Beatrice Santorini and Mark Steedman. In addition, Jeff Aaronson, Douglas DeCarlo, Mark-Jason Dominus, Mark Foster, Gaylord Holder, David Magerman, Ken Noble, Steven Shapiro and Ira Winston have provided technical support. Adminstrative support was provided by Susan Deysher, Carolyn Elken, Jodi Kerper, Christine Sandy and Trisha Yannuzzi. This work was partially supported by NSF Grant SBR8920230 and ARO Grant DAAH040494-G-0426. Part I General Information