Publisher's Synopsis
Book & CD-ROM. This book is the second volume in a set of two books with the same title, but different subtitle, organised around two scientifically distinct but, in fact, strictly interrelated fields of research: sentence level linguistic phenomena; text or discourse level linguistic phenomena where the former is to be described by means of grammatical theories, the latter requires the intervention of extralinguistic knowledge, i.e. knowledge of the world, appropriately stored in lexica or ontologies. the books are organised mainly as an experimental exercise: they illustrate the theoretical background with the output of the system, GETARUNS, that enacts and applies the theory. The architecture of the system is strictly related to the structure of the books. BOOK 1 addresses sentence grammar or what is usually referred to as such by theoretical linguists. It does it by dividing up -- somewhat ideally and sometimes arbitrarily -- what must or needs to be computed at sentence level from what needs not or cannot be computed at the same level, and consequently belongs to discourse grammar. The books also indirectly do another (un)intended subdivision: the one existing between syntax and semantics. Again, it would be impossible not to deal with semantically related issues when talking about syntax or the lexicon. However, semantics with uppercase S, is only treated in Book 2 (already published) where discourse and text level grammar is tackled. Therefore, this book deals with all that concerns the level of sentence grammar in a computational environment, i.e. sentence level parsing. In our approach, knowledge of the world and semantic disambiguation do not interfere with the rules of sentence grammar, and can be thought of as a separate level of computation, provided the lexicon can be structured in such a way to allow a neat subdivision of tasks.
