Periphrasis

Periphrasis is a device by which a grammatical category or grammatical relationship is expressed by a free morpheme (such as an auxiliary verb), instead of being shown by inflection or derivation.

In the UNL^arium framework, periphrases always lead to the creation of syntactic relations, which are expressed through S-rules as follows:

(SOURCE NODE) := RELATION(HEAD; ARGUMENT);

Where

• CONDITION is a tag or list of tags, extracted from the UNDLF Tagset, corresponding to the value of the attribute to be realised by complex grammatical structures;
• RELATION is the syntactic relation to be created, extracted from the syntactic roles. It must include a HEAD and an ARGUMENT (the specifier, the complement or the adjunct). Either the HEAD or an ARGUMENT must correspond to the node undergoing the transformation, and must be marked as %01 if not co-indexed to any node in the condition field.

Examples

• (FUT):=IC([will];%01,+INF);

• • The auxiliary verb "will" is generated as the head of the inflectional phrase in case of future
• PRS,PGS:=IH([be])VP(GER);
  • The auxiliary verb "be" is generated as the head of the inflectional phrase in case of present progressive (PRS,PGS) and t