New PAPPI: Examples

The blue tab menu contains an option to load examples from the textbook "A Course in GB Syntax" (Lasnik & Uriagereka, 1988). This option brings up a separate browser window:


[Click on an image to enlarge.]

To send a single example to the main display, simply click on the play button to the left.

(Bug: currently you must do "load defaults" first, otherwise the newpappi process will hang.)

The "Run all examples" button will send all examples found in the browser window to the main display.

It is possible to create your own set of example sentences. The "Load" button will allow you to select any .xpl file.
(See the Appendix below for the .xpl file format details.)

It is also possible to have multiple browsers simultaneously open.

Each browser is an independent process and communicates with the parser via port 9992.
Simply run the supplied browse.tcl under the Wish interpreter. For example: 

wish browse.tcl sentences.xpl
in a terminal window starts up a sentence browser on file sentences.xpl.
(Note: this assumes both browse.tcl and the .xpl are in the same directory.)

Alternatively: 

wish browse.tcl
starts up an empty sentence browser.


[Click on image to enlarge.]

Use the "Load" button to select a .xpl file.

(Quirk: currently you must start the Lasnik & Uriagereka examples first before starting any other sentence browsers. This is because Prolog needs to fork a child process to listen for browser input in additional to the main GUI. Starting the Lasnik & Uriagereka examples sets this up. You should not quit the Lasnik & Uriagereka sentence browser when you use a secondary sentence browser.)

Appendix

The Lasnik & Uriagereka examples are contained in the file l&u.xpl.
(On the Mac platform, this file can be found in the /Applications/newpappi.app/Contents/Resources folder.)

You can create your own examples file using a text editor. The "Load" button in the browser will permit the loading of any file with the .xpl extension.

By convention, a play button will be placed at the start of any line beginning with [...].

The example sentence is taken to be the text after [...] up to the end of the line or the comment character (%). Each sentence must be on a separate line. Simple preprocessing will be applied to the extracted text.

Note: the current preprocessor (written in tcl) will perform the following:

  1. strip off leading ?*!#
  2. tokenize 's and 't, trailing ' -> 's
  3. case fold, e.g. John -> john
  4. skip over words enclosed by parentheses, e.g. (over) here -> here
  5. delete punctuation characters :.;,
  6. handles language glossing, e.g. anata$you -> anata plus the feature eng(you)
  7. process indices, e.g. in [2:34a] *John[i] thinks John[i] likes Mary, both occurrences of John will receive the feature index(I) such that I is the same value.
The preprocessor may be modified by a user with programming experience. It is in file interface2.tcl.

Lines not beginning with [...] are considered to contain no examples.

For example, l&u.xpl looks like this: 

"A Course in GB Syntax"
BY LASNIK AND URIAGEREKA

THE THETA-GRID AND X-BAR THEORY
 [1:4a]	 John slept
 [1:4b]	 John hit Bill
 [1:8a]	*John slept Bill
 [1:8b]	*John hit
 	
THE LF COMPONENT AND QUANTIFIER RAISING
 [1:10a]	 Mary likes everyone
 [1:12a]	 Someone likes everyone
 [1:13a]	*Who does mary like john	% Vacuous operator
Last modified: Mon Apr 28 22:32:34 MST 2014