A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

Foods> linearize Pred (These Cheese) (Very Expensive)
these cheeses are very expensive
dawn il- ġobniet huma għaljin ħafna
Finally we can perform a translation from Maltese to English by piping the output of a parse
into a linearise command:
Foods> parse -lang=Mlt "din il- ġobna hija tajba ħafna" | linearize -lang=Eng
this cheese is very delicious
1.3.3 Resource Grammar Library
The example grammar in the previous section is small, but as grammars grow in size having
a module system becomes vital. Both abstract and concrete syntaxes can be split into separate
modules, which promotes not only manageability but more importantly code re-use. Because
the morphological and syntactic details of natural languages can be quite complex, it doesn’t
make sense for every new grammar written in GF to have to re-implement these features. Instead,
the low-level details of a language can be put into a resource grammar whose abstract
syntax models phenomena on the syntactic level. A separate application grammar can then
be written which focuses on the high-level modelling tasks, using functions defined in the resource
grammar as needed. This additional level of abstraction in grammar design means that
code for semantic modelling does not need to be mixed with code that handles syntax and
morphology.
Apart from the compiler and runtime system, the GF distribution also includes a standard
library known as the Resource Grammar Library (RGL) (Ranta, 2009). The RGL provides
general linguistic descriptions for natural languages which can be reused by using a common
language independent API. This library covers the morphology and basic syntax of some 28
languages from around the world (where Maltese is the 28 th language to be added). This
means programmers who wish to use GF to write some application grammar do not need to
worry about the tedious low-level details like word order and agreement in each language;
they simply use the standard functions provided by the API and the linearisation into each
language is handled automatically by GF.
Using the RGL in an application grammar
Continuing with the Foods example, we now show an example of the English concrete syntax
which uses the Resource Grammar Library. We name this module FoodsEngRGL. Note how this
module opens SyntaxEng and ParadigmsEng, which together make up the API to the library.
In comparison to the previous version of FoodsEng above, FoodsEngRGL does not encode any
linguistic information itself. No parameters are defined and no agreement handling takes place;
Instead, the categories are given linearisation types directly from the RGL; for example, Kind is
given the type of a common noun CN. The function linearisations also look simpler — instead
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