Contributions to formal and computational linguistics Abstract

Syntax and semantics have always taken center stage in linguistics. The accumulated knowledge was stored and transmitted in the form of grammars, dictionaries and specialized publications. With the advent of computational linguistics in the second half of the twentieth century there was a growing interest for the application of that knowledge in systems for automatic speech and language processing, such as machine translation, question-answer systems, speech recognition, etc. This in turn led to formalization and methodological innovation of linguistics. My research  is on the cross roads of formal and computational linguistics. It consists of contributions (1) to those branches of generative grammar which pay special attention to the applicability for computational purposes, (2) to the construction of large scale syntactically annotated corpora for written and spoken Dutch, and (3) to the exploitation of those corpora for syntactic and semantic investigation.