Drawing trees for Arabic sentences

[Frank Antonson]

Compare it to the following website:

Reed-Kellogg Diagrammer

Frank

[knowledge seeker]

very useful , thanks
that website is designed in particular for LFG syntax
check out these two links , they provide the same service :

Probabilistic LFG Parser

LFG Parser

but , personally , I don't rely too much on such parsers . I do't trust them completely especially in terms of languages other than English .
What do u think ?

[Frank Antonson]

Well, I looked at those sites.

I imagine that they are able to do amazing things, but I return to the idea that Reed-Kellogg cannot be beat in terms of simplicity and elegance.

Those sites may be able to handle a wonderful sentence like:

"For naught so vile that on this earth doth live but to the earth some special good doth give; nor aught so good, but strained from that fair use, revolts on true birth stumbling on abuse"

But there would be, in the end, so much information about that sentence that its beauty would be gone.

See the thread
http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/an...6-cat-5-a.html

Frank

[chester_100]

If you like we can work on diagramming a couple of Arabic sentences.

[Frank Antonson]

Chester,
I am so glad to see that you are back.
I thought of trying to find a way for Knowledge Seeker to find you.
This seems like the perfect subject for you and your skills.
Be sure to share whatever you do with the rest of us.
Frank

[chester_100]

Hi Frank, I'm so glad to read your posts again. Sure, I'll try to my best to be of help.Thank you very much.

[stanislaw.masny]

مساء الخير Knowledge Seeker
May I add my piece of information? I'm not interested in syntax trees
(more in شجر).
You can check on Google:
1. Concrete syntax tree - Wikipedia,
2. Arabic - WordReference Forum.
#2. is similar to usingenglish forum
ليلت سعيدة

[knowledge seeker]

Hi guys ,
I am so glad to see your contributions .
Chester , مساء النور
Infact , I am so confused ; I am working on my MA thesis and I need to draw trees for a set of sentences written on one of Arabic dialects ,
e.g : راح الولد المدرسة
وين الولد ؟
. I chose Lexical Functional Grammar as a frame work for data parsing .The trees will represent the "C-structure " of that theory .
Now , I am so confused , I don't know which syntactic rules to adopt for drawing trees ? . As far as I know , phrase structure rules and X-bar theory of generative grammar are not applicable to languages such as Arabic because Arabic has a relatively free word order . It is possible to adopt transformational rules but these rules use movements and movements between constituents is not acceptable according to LFG .
I wish the point is clear now and I will appreciate your guidance , guys

Regards .

[Frank Antonson]

I have to defer.

I do not understand.

As I have so often said, the American Reed-Kellogg system may be very simplistic, but it serves to analyze any sentence that makes sense.

As a contribution, I can offer to diagram any sentence in English, German, Portuguese, Spanish, or French. If a sentence in Arabic can be translated into any of these, I can diagram it.

Frank

[knowledge seeker]

Frank , thanks for this nice offer .

Actually , I need to diagram the sentences as they are in the Arabic transcript not the translation . If you have no background of syntactic theories such as generative grammar , transformational grammar and lexical functional grammar , you will not understand what I am talking about .
But I realy wonder how come to be a native speaker of English and not familiar with such theories ?


Stanislaw , thanks for ur reply , in fact , I posted an identical thread to this one on word-reference forums but I received no replys .
Regards ,