Grammatík

Grammatík is a modular framework and notation system for describing the morphosyntactic structure of natural languages. It provides a formalized approach to sentence construction, inflection, and word formation, with an emphasis on cross-linguistic applicability and systematic documentation. Grammatík is used by linguists, language educators, and developers of language technologies to model grammar rules, generate surface forms, and analyze data from diverse languages.

The core of Grammatík consists of a tree-based representation of syntactic structures combined with feature structures that capture grammatical information such as person, number, gender, case, tense, aspect, mood, and voice. The framework supports a flexible typology, allowing users to encode both rigid and highly marked word orders, agreement systems, and derivational processes. A built-in lexicon and morphology module links lexical entries to inflectional patterns, enabling the production of correctly inflected forms from roots.

Grammatík originated in the early 2010s through an international collaboration among linguists and language technologists. It was designed to serve both theoretical description and practical documentation, with an emphasis on transparency and interoperability. Over time, open tools and libraries were developed to annotate corpora, convert data between formats, and integrate Grammatík representations into language-learning resources and natural language processing pipelines.

Applications of Grammatík include field documentation of endangered languages, description and comparison of grammatical systems in descriptive grammars, and classroom education for illustrating morphosyntax. In computational contexts, Grammatík stylizes grammar encoding for parsing, generation, grammar checking, and multilingual annotation workflows.

Example: encoding the sentence The boy sees the dog in Grammatík would involve a subject NP with features for number and person, a VP with a tense value, and an object NP with its own feature set, reflecting standard S structure and cross-linguistic agreement possibilities.