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<Paper uid="W02-1203">
  <Title>Urdu and the Parallel Grammar Project</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper, we report on the role of the Urdu grammar in the Parallel Grammar (ParGram) project (Butt et al., 1999; Butt et al., 2002). The ParGram project originally focused on three closely related European languages: English, French, and German.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Once grammars for these languages were established, two Asian languages were added: Japanese and Urdu.2 Both grammars have been successfully integrated into the project. Here we discuss the Urdu grammar and what special challenges it brought to the ParGram project. We are pleased to report that creating an Urdu grammar within the ParGram standards has been possible and has led to typologically useful extensions to the project.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The ParGram project uses the XLE parser  and grammar development platform (Maxwell and Kaplan, 1993) to develop deep grammars for six languages. All of the grammars use the Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) formalism which produces c(onstituent)-structures (trees) and f(unctional)-structures (AVMs) as syntactic analyses.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> LFG assumes a version of Chomsky's Universal Grammar hypothesis, namely that all languages are governed by similar underlying structures. Within LFG, f-structures encode a language universal level of analysis, allowing for cross-linguistic parallelism. The ParGram project aims to test the LFG formalism for its universality and coverage limitations and to see how far parallelism can be maintained across languages. Where possible, the analyses produced for similar constructions in each language are parallel. This parallelism requires a standard for linguistic analysis. In addition, the LFG theory itself limits the set of possible analyses, thus restricting the possible analyses to choose from. The standardization of the analyses has the computational advantage that the grammars can be used in similar applications, and it can simplify cross-language applications (Frank, 1999).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The conventions developed within the ParGram grammars are extensive. The ParGram project dictates not only the form of the features used in the grammars, but also the types of analyses that are chosen for constructions. In addition, the XLE platform necessarily restricts how the grammars can be written. In all cases, the Urdu grammar has successfully, and straightforwardly, incorporated the standards that were originally designed for the European languages. In addition, it has contributed to the formulation of new standards of analysis. Below we discuss several aspects of this: morphology, lexicon, and grammar development for the Urdu grammar within the ParGram project.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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