Syntactic Transformations in Rule-Based Parsing of Support Verb Constructions: Examples from European Portuguese

This paper reports on-going work on building a rule-based grammar for (European) Portuguese, incorporating support verb constructions (SVC). The paper focuses on parsing sentences resulting from syntactic transformations of SVC, and presents a methodology to automatically generate testing examples directly from the SVC Lexicon-Grammar matrix where their linguistic properties are represented. These examples allow both to improve the linguistic description of these constructions and to test intrinsically the system parser, spotting unforeseen issues due to previous natural language processing steps.