Drawing trees for Arabic sentences

[chester_100]

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

That’s really a good idea. But the problem is that Arabic doesn’t follow the conventional Indo-European syntactic rules. For example, unlike English (or many other languages), the subject of the sentence may be implied, or shown through inflection.
In translation, we have to adapt it to English rules, so the sentence will undergo a transformation.

[chester_100]

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 .

Kernel sentences: simple, active, declarative sentences that require the minimum of transformation.

How to apply X-bar theory to Arabic?

First of all, I have to admit that this is a very complicated case, because I have never done any research on such linguistic aspects of Arabic.
Some good understanding of the function of articles can really help us; as far as I know, AL (ال) serves as the definite article in Arabic; for example, we say: Al + shams = the + sun.
The X-bar theory says syntactic structures like noun phrases without articles create a new category that should be represented by a bar over the name of the category.

Now, to continue, I need knowledge seeker to give us some brief explanation of the concept of articles in Arabic. I mean, will it sound strange to an Arabic speaker when he encounters, in a sentence, شمس instead of الشمس ?

من الله توفيق

[Frank Antonson]

I still suspect that Reed-Kellogg could work for Arabic.

Implied subjects and other parts of sentences should not be a problem. They are represented with "x"'s. Latin also has very much of the syntactic information carried by inflections. Julius Caesar's famous quote "Veni, vidi, vici" can be diagrammed easily as three independent clauses. "I came, I saw, I conquered".

In your post, Chester, I was very interested to see you write Arabic in Roman letters and left to right. I did not realized that was ever done.

Frank

[chester_100]

I still suspect that Reed-Kellogg could work for Arabic.

Implied subjects and other parts of sentences should not be a problem. They are represented with "x"'s. Latin also has very much of the syntactic information carried by inflections. Julius Caesar's famous quote "Veni, vidi, vici" can be diagrammed easily as three independent clauses. "I came, I saw, I conquered".

In your post, Chester, I was very interested to see you write Arabic in Roman letters and left to right. I did not realized that was ever done.

Frank

Oh I see; so after knowledge seeker's reply, we will work on a sentence.Yes, it's possible to turn languages into Roman form through transliteration (phonological adaptaion).

[knowledge seeker]

Chester , Frank thanks for u r replies.
You are right Chester , drawing trees for a language such as Arabic is really a CHALLENGE for a number of reasons :
1- Arabic allows more than one word-order . It has SVO with possible VSO & VOS .
2- It is highly inflectional and derivaltional .
3- the presence of an elliptic personal pronoun " the implied subject الضمير المستتر " as u stated earlier .
Since I am doing an academic research , I need to base my work on a solid scientific ground ; on formal syntactic rules . As I said befor PSR & X-theory are not applicable to Arabic . this is what is stated in authentic syntax text -books .Also , TG doesn't work coz LFG is chosen as a frame work . In fact , which letters to use is not a problem . My problem is which rules to adopt for diagraming . I need solid base .

From my readings , I understand that drawing trees for Arabic is approached by adopting "context free grammer" . Do u have any idea about this kind of grammar ? and how to apply it to Arabic ?
Regarding ur question about Definiteness , Arabic nouns are of two types :
1- definite nouns المعرفة e.g الشمس which are marked by the definite article ال,a prefix that is attached to the beginning of a wrod , in terms of use , it is equivelant to the definite article "the " in English .
2- indifinite nouns نكرة : e.g شمس , these nouns , unlike English a , an , are un marked by any bound or free morphemes . I hope that I answer you .

[Frank Antonson]

I am not sure that I understand where you two could go with this discussion; but, from my standpoint, there seem to be about 25 "parts of sentences" -- just like there are about 8 "parts of speech". Reed-kellogg has a way to show each one of those 25. If some language that is not Indo-European related has some other part of a sentence, I would REALLY like to know about it because that would be a mind-opener. It could say something about the human mind.
Matters like tense, person, number, case, and gender are not necessarily parts of syntax. From what I have seen of other diagramming systems, they include information about those. The result is that the diagrams become very detailed and intricate.
Morphology and syntax do not have to be included within the same diagram.
I think it might be of use if someone reading this, who is a native speaker of an un-inflected language (say, Chinese), would give us their (his/her) input.
Frank

[chester_100]

I believe Frank has brought up some good ideas:
1. Morphological and lexical complexities will not be nesseceraily problematic for diagramming a sentence. (refer to his Latin example).
2. We have to break a sentence into its meaningful componential elements (that are usually among the universals), no matter how different they are from one language to another.

[chester_100]

2- indifinite nouns نكرة : e.g شمس , these nouns , unlike English a , an , are un marked by any bound or free morphemes . I hope that I answer you .

About the context-free grammar: I'm familiar with phrase structure rules and Transformational grammar.
I think we have to use them here. In your paper, you can simply state the problem this way:


-Due to the nature of the language under investigation, an adaptable approach had to be selected which may be different from the popular theories in certain ways. The approach, being descriptive and situation-based, attempts to represent the syntax as it is in Arabic.-
So let's take a look at a rule:


-NP ---> Art + N (English)
-NP ---> (Art) + N (Arabic)
The above formula for Arabic simply solves the problem. So even if the noun is infinite, you can still represent it.

[chester_100]

Let's try this. Here is a kernel sentence:
اَنت افضل مغنيه في المدرسه : Arabic
English : You are the best singer in the school.

Note:
1. I not sure about the verb in the Arabic sentence. I suppose it's hiddenالمستتر.
2. مغنيه
seems to be a feminine noun


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[Frank Antonson]

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