gf-rgl/src/spanish

Spanish

Language information

• English name: Spanish
• Autonym: español
• ISO code: Spa

Authors

• Aarne Ranta

With contributions from Inger Andersson, Bruno Cuconato, Inari Listenmaa, and Therese Söderberg.

Implementation information

The Spanish Resource Grammar is built using the Romance functor at romance, and it mostly follows Spanish spoken in Spain.

Romance instantiations differ mostly in their morphological modules and in the constructions defined in the =Diff*= modules. Some relevant features:

• two copulas, ser and estar
• prepositions that contract with articles are de and a, called genitive and dative respectively. When forming new prepositions, e.g. después de use mkPrep "después" genitive to get correct contractions.
• no inversion in question clauses, except for QuestIComp and QuestIAdv.

Known issues

• Verbs with dative subject don't actually have it. Example:

Lang> p "I like grammars" | l
I like grammars
yo gusto gramáticas

This is not a massive problem per se, the application grammarian just needs to know this is the case. If your application grammar has a function like the following:

fun Like : NP -> NP -> Cl ;

then you just need to linearise it as follows:

lin Like subj obj = mkCl obj like_V2 subj ;

(Why don't we have it? Verbs like gustar inflect according to the logical object of the sentence; this would mean we'd need 2-dimensional inflection tables for verbs, and while that's a cool thing, it's also expensive and not needed for anything else.)

• Contractions with con and pronouns: con + mí/ti/… should be conmigo/contigo/…, but the contraction is not implemented.

• Clitic pronouns and their combinations:

-- PredVP (UsePron i_Pron) (ComplSlash (SlashVV want_VV (Slash2V3 give_V3 (UsePron he_Pron))) (UsePron it_Pron))
LangEng: i want to give him it
LangSpa: yo lo quiero dar &+ le -- should be dárselo
-- PredVP (UsePron i_Pron) (ComplVV want_VV (ComplSlash (Slash3V3 give_V3 (UsePron it_Pron)) (UsePron he_Pron)))
LangEng: i want to give him it
LangSpa: yo quiero dar &+ lo le -- should be dárselo

• Accents in imperatives and infinitives with clitics

--ImpVP (ComplSlash (Slash2V3 give_V3 (UsePron i_Pron)) (UsePron it_Pron))
LangEng: give me it
LangSpa: da &+ lo me

Ignoring the clitic combination (should be dámelo), the verb form da should get an accent dá to show the correct syllable stress.

Data

Besch & Irreg

The BeschSpa and IrregSpa modules contain the complete inflection tables for all different Spanish verb types. Based on the Functional Morphology implementation by Inger Andersson and Therese Söderberg.

DictSpa

This module contains nouns, adjectives and verbs taken from Open Multilingual Wordnet and DictionarySpa (mostly from Wiktionary).

Multiwords

Some thousands of multiwords are manually checked. As of February 2019, around 4000 are unchecked. Those are marked in DictSpa with -- to-check segmentation.

Morphology

WIP.

• Where there was a non-1-arg paradigm in the old resources, that is retained.
• All verbs that overlap with IrregSpa use the IrregSpa definition.
• Most of the manually checked multiwords are also checked for morphology, but naturally, errors do occur.

History and applications

Some applications include:

• MOLTO phrasebook
• GF Mathematical Grammar Library (paper, demo)
• GF Wide-Coverage translator

Maintainers

Inari Listenmaa (@inariksit)
Bruno Cuconato (@odanoburu)