The Computation of Syntactic Features

Abstract

In the previous chapter, I have illustrated how configurations and categorial information are encoded in the parser. They are represented as tables which are consulted on-line by an LR algorithm. Not all the principles of the grammar, however, are represented in these tables. In particular the annotation of the nodes by what I have called syntactic features, e.g. θ-role and Case is performed on-line, while building the tree. Feature assignment can be strictly local to one of the configurations defined by X̄ theory, or it might involve sharing features between distant elements. This kind of feature assignment will be discussed in the first sections.