Section: Scientific Foundations
Metagrammars
Participants : Éric Villemonte de La Clergerie, Benoit Crabbé, Marie Candito.
- Metagrammar
a metagrammar is a grammatical description that is an abstraction of the grammar level; a metagrammar is composed of classes that include elements of grammatical description and combination constraints; classes are combined, and their elements of grammatical description are merged, according to these combination contraints into final classes; the combination of grammatical descriptions contained in final classes constitute a grammar in the usual sense of the term
- TAG
Tree-Adjoining Grammar
- LFG
Lexical-Functional Grammar
For hand-crafted grammars, some Alpage members try to design adequate tools and adequate levels of representation for linguists, and in particular Meta-Grammars [119] , [114] . Meta-Grammars allows the linguist to focus on a modular description of the linguistic aspects of a grammar, rather than focusing on the specific aspects of a given grammatical formalism. Translation from MGs to grammatical formalisms such as TAG or LFG may be automatically handled. Graphical environments can be used to design MGs and their modularity provides a promising way for sharing the description of common linguistic phenomena across human languages.
Inside Alpage, both Éric de La Clergerie (mgcomp system, FRMG metagrammar) and Benoît Crabbé (XMG system, Benoît Crabbé's metagrammar) are foreground actors of the development and implementation of these notions. It is also worth noting that this emergence of the MG notion is a good illustration of this cross-fertilization between ex-Talana members (the birth place of MGs) and ex-Atoll members.
