Parsing Difficulties & Phonological Processing in Italian

A recognition grammar to supply information to a text-to-speech system for the synthesis of Italian must rely heavily upon lexical information, in order to instantiate the appropriate grammatical relations.Italian is an almost free word order language which nonetheless adopts fairly analysable strategies to move major constituents: some of these can strongly affect the functioning of the phonological component. Two basic claims will be made: i. difficulties in associating grammatical functions to constituent structure can be overcome only if Lexical Theory is adopted as a general theoretical framework, and translated into adequate computational formalisms like ATN or CHART; ii. decisions made at previous point affect focus structure construal rules, which are higher level phonological rules which individuate intonation centre, build up adequate Intonational Groups and assign pauses to adequate sites, all being very sensitive to syntactic and semantic information.We will concentrate on Subject/Object function association to c-structure in Italian, and its relation to ATN formalism, in particular HOLD mechanism and FLAGging. Then we will show how syntactic decisions interact with an intonation grammar. We shall also introduce two functional notions: STRUCTURE REVERSIBILITY vs. FUNCTIONAL REVERSIBILITY in Italian.