Fitting a Round Peg in a Square Hole: Japanese Resource Grammar in GF

摘要

This paper is a report on the development of a Japanese resource grammar in Grammatical Framework (GF), a programming language for multilingual grammars and their applications. Japanese became the 25 language in the GF Resource Grammar Library (RGL). Grammars in the RGL are based on a common abstract syntax, which covers grammatical categories and syntactic relations that are supposed to be shared by different languages. Being typologically and genetically distant from the languages covered by the RGL, Japanese disputes the generality of some rules in the RGL abstract syntax and brings up new issues in the discussion on the universal properties of languages.