A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

3.4 Generating full forms
After creating a monolingual dictionary module as described in the previous section, this module
can be used with the GF runtime in order to produce full forms for each of our lexemes.
This task is also carried out using a Haskell script, which accesses a compiled version of the
dictionary modules using the PGF library.
3.4.1 Nouns
For nouns which do not already have an explicit plural form included in the lexicon, just the
use of the smart paradigm alone will provide a plural form. This can be found by using the
linearise -table command.
In cases where nouns take a postclitic pronoun to indicate possession, one cannot simply
look at its inflection table since clitics are handled at the syntax level. Instead, a template tree is
constructed and linearised with the bind lexer in order to produce the correctly inflected form.
For nouns, the following template tree was used:
DetCN (DetQuant (PossPron ) NumSg)
where is the pronoun indicating the direct object (possessor) and is the noun under
analysis.
3.4.2 Adjectives
For adjectives, simply using the linearise command on the lexical units is enough to get the
inflections for gender and number, and the forms for comparative and superlative.
3.4.3 Verbs
For verbs, the situation is a lot more complex, Since a number of morphological features are
produced by syntactic constructors in the grammar, we again need to use template trees for
producing inflections. At the top level, sentences in the different tenses and polarities are generated
using these templates:
Perfective: UseCl (TTAnt TPast ASimul) (PredVP (UsePron ) )
Imperfective: UseCl (TTAnt TPres ASimul) (PredVP (UsePron ) )
Imperative: UttImpSg (ImpVP )
UttImpPl (ImpVP )
where is a clause, which may be defined in many ways depending on what combination
of object clitics is being produced:
Direct: UseV
DO: ComplSlash (SlashVa ) (UsePron )
IO: AdvVP (ComplSlash (SlashVa ) ) (PrepNP for_Prep (UsePron ))
DO + IO: AdvVP (ComplSlash (SlashVa ) (UsePron )) (PrepNP for_Prep (UsePron ))
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