A Multimodal Typelogical Grammar for Verb Clusters with Past Participles in Dutch Subordinate Clauses
Davy Baardink

This research focuses on extending the multimodal typelogical grammar fragment for Dutch verb clusters as developed by Michael Moortgat (1999). The extended grammar fragment is intended to enable parsing of verb clusters with past participles in Dutch subordinate clauses. Based on existing theory on past participles and the multimodal typelogical grammar formalism, postulates that allow the parser to parse such clusters are added to the fragment. The extended grammar is tested against relevant subordinate clauses from the LASSY-klein corpus. Adding an additional mode to the binary operators and introducing postulates based on that mode proves to be insufficient as it allowed ungrammatical sentences to be parsed. Adding an additional mode to the unary structural operators and introducing three postulates based on this additional mode proves to be able to allow the parser to parse all sentences with one participle, but not all sentences with two participles. The three
postulates are modified and three more postulates are added to the fragment for a total of six postulates that allow the parser to parse all subordinate clauses with one or more participles. The research concludes that the grammar fragment extended with the six postulates can enable parsing of verb clusters with past participles in
Dutch subordinate clauses and that the research goal has been reached.