The lexicon of a Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar comprises the level of lexemes and the level of words. Words are generated by means of lexical rules from the lexemes. Sag; Wasow; Bender (2003) propose lexical rules like the 3rd-Singular- Verb Lexical Rule and the Non-3rd-Singular- Verb Lexical Rule for the generation of English finite verb forms. If one were to apply the same paradigm to Spanish, 61 verb forms would be required to accommodate the same number of inflectional rules. To reduce this complexity, we are introducing a new type of rule-scheme, a scheme of lexical rules, with the parameters person, number, tense and mood, which covers all the finite verb forms in Spanish. At the level of the lexeme, we suggest the feature MORPH with information about conjugation class and distribution of stems and affixes. In combination with lists of inflectional endings, the generation of the verb forms takes place. The semantic description of the resulting words includes, besides the lexical meaning, a component for tense and mood as well as for person, number and gender. In addition to the analysis of finite forms, our SPANVERB grammar also generates and analyses the infinitive, gerund and participles. Since the processing of Spanish verb forms with enclitic pronouns present special problems, an analysis component was developed.
展开▼