Biblical Hebrew parsing on display: The Role-Lexical Module (RLM) as a tool for Role and Reference Grammar

Abstract

The Role-Lexical Module (RLM) is a tool to build a lexicon of logical structure and semantic representation for Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). It was first presented in Winther-Nielsen (2008), and the present contribution explains improvements in the interface developed by project developer and designer Chris Wilson in 2008 and 2009. Using the purely structural information in the database of the Werkgroep Informatica at the Vrije Universiteit (WIVU) in Amsterdam, we display linguistic data bearing on the syntax-to-semantics linking algorithm at work in the structuralist-functional theory of RRG. In this paper, I supply further information on our new transliteration adhering to Nava Bergman's Cambridge Workboook of Biblical Hebrew (2005) as well as automated glossing and lexical selection. The main focus of this paper is, however, to explain how a Web-application can be used to display syntactic structure in tables containing the output of rewrite rules from a chart parser. The boxes in these tables display syntactic structure in a way which resembles the syntactic trees of a projectionist theory like RRG, and adding a true tree display to the RLM-tool is by now largely a matter of funding of programming. Syntactic examples are taken from our Genesis 1-3 corpus (i.e. Gen 1:1-3, 5, 16, 27; 2:5), and the issue of syntactic templates is brought up. For the initial sentence (Gen 1:1), I briefly discuss the logical structure and the semantic representation of the core combined with thematic roles. I conclude by proposing how this tool can be improved and used for other languages, and how it has teaching potential for online linguistic courses as well as learning tools using our database technology.