Parsing Difficulties & Phonological Processing in Italian

ARSING )IFFICULTIES U )HONOLOGICAL )ROCESSING IN I[TALIAN Rodolfo Delmonte Istituto di Linguistica e Didattica Ca' Garzoni-Moro - S.Mareo 3417 Univeesit~ degli Studi di Venezla(I) ABSTRACT A recognition grammar to supply information to a text-to-speech system for the synthesis of Italian must rely heavily upon lexical information, in order to instantiate the appropriate grammatical relations. Italian is an almost free word order language which nonetheless adopts fairly analysable stra- tegies to move major constituents: some of these can strongly affect the functioning of the pho- notogical component. Two basic claims will be made: i. difficulties in associating grammatical functions to constituent structure can be overcome only if Lexical Theory is adopted as a general theoretical framework, and translated into adequate computational formalisms like ATN or CHART; ii. decisions made at previous point affect focus structure construal rules, which are higher level phonologicaI rules which individuate intonation centre, build up adequate Intonational Groups and assign pauses to adequate sites, all being very sensitive to syntactic and semantic i nf ormat i on. We will concentrate on Subject/Object function association to c-structure in Italian, and its relation to ATN formalism, in particular HOLD mechanism and F~Gging. Then we will show how syn- tactic decisions interact with an intonation grammar. We shall also introduce two functional no- tions: STRUCTURE REVERSIBILITY vs. FUNCTIONAL REVERSIBILITY in Italian. 1. INTRODUCTION In a recent paper we presented (Delmonte, 1983) a phonological processor for Italian which has been implemented at the University of Venice and is used in a text-to-speech system (Delmonte et al., 1984) for the synthesis of Italian at the Centre of Computational Sonology of the University of Padua. Recently the system has been equipped with a lexi- con and a morphological analyser (DeImonte et al., 1985) while the parser is on its way to be built, which, since we adopt Lexical-Functiona! Grammar (LFG) (Bresnan, 1982), as background linguistic theory, should take the form of a chart, much in the vein of Kay's (1977,1979,1980) and Kaplan's (1973) functional and general syntactic parsers. At present we are working at the context-free gram- mar and the semantic information to be associated with each lexical entry. As it appears, Italian is a much more comptex language to be analysed when compared with English, German and French. As we shall discuss in the paper, difficulties arise basically because Italian has a relatively much higher freedom in the order of constituents than the above mentioned languages. Also, the phenomenon of the unexpressed Subject or Null Subject, makes the working of a parser a much harder task. In this sense, a chart being unbiased as to what procedure to adopt in the course of the analysis, will allow 136 the parser to benefit both from tcp-down and bottom- up procedures in an efficient way (plus the obvious back-up and parallel processing operations usually required). Besides, both semantic and grammatical features need to be present throughout the parsing process, and they will be used to guide the overall parsing strategy. 2. P~IVE STRUCTURES AND …

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