Grammalle

Grammalle is a hypothetical framework for modeling grammar in linguistics and language technology. It offers a multi-layer formalism intended to describe syntactic structure together with semantic interpretation, while remaining compatible with data-driven approaches. Grammalle is designed to support parsing, annotation, and language-education tooling by providing both rule-based descriptions and probabilistic weights that reflect usage patterns.

The term grammalle was introduced in a collaborative research project in the early 2020s, with the intention of creating an extensible, cross-linguistic grammar formalism. The name combines elements of traditional grammar terminology with a suffix implying scalability and inclusivity across languages.

Structure and features: Grammalle organizes grammar into several interconnected layers. A lexical layer handles morpho-phonological forms and subcategorization frames; a syntactic layer encodes constituent structure and feature agreements; a semantic layer captures predicate-argument relations and thematic roles; a discourse layer manages coreference and information structure. Rules may be universal or language-specific, and their strengths are parameterized to reflect frequencies and acceptability judgments. The system is designed to interoperate with lexicons, corpora, and annotation schemes, enabling consistent cross-language comparison.

Implementation and use: Researchers have prototyped grammalle-based parsers and annotation tools, using it to align treebanks and to support language-learning software. It has been reported to facilitate multilingual evaluation and to aid in error analysis and grammar teaching, though its complexity and data requirements remain challenges.

See also: Formal grammar, Constraint-based grammar, Computational linguistics, Natural language processing.