Computational grammars for English, which are based, more or less directly, on linguistic theories are the Alvey [19,45] and CLE [2] grammars (both based on GPSG), XTAG (based on TAG [44]), the Parallel Grammar Project at Xerox (based on LFG, for English, French and German [67]), and ERGO [35] and ALE [20] grammars (both based on HPSG). Typically, such grammars account for phenomena such as subcategorisation, agreement, auxiliary inversion, copula and small-clause constructions, passives, long-distance dependencies, relative clauses, extra-position, PP-attachment, anaphoric binding, adverb placement, etc. The implemented grammars are intended as faithful, yet computationally feasible, implementations of a given linguistic theory. Linguistic processing of such systems requires, at least, the ability to handle complex data-structures (usually (typed) feature structures), under-specification and unification, highly under-specified syntactic schemata (in which the order and number of the daughters may be under-specified), (recursive) lexical rules, and, sometimes, the ability to handle default mechanisms of various kinds.
Below, we propose to develop a linguistically motivated computational grammar for Dutch, comparable in coverage to systems available for English. At the moment, there is no such grammar available for Dutch, although a non-trivial grammar fragment has been developed within the NWO Priority Programme Language and Speech Technology (TST).
Note that developing such a grammar will involve implementing accounts for a number of phenomena which do not occur, or occur to a lesser extent, in English, such as cross-serial dependencies, the word order differences between (verb-final) subordinate clauses and (verb-initial or verb-second) main clauses, and the relative free order of adjuncts in the ``Mittelfeld''.
We propose to take the TST fragment as a starting point for a more general grammar. Before we explain what is involved in the development of such a grammar, we will first motivate this choice as follows.