Developing a deep grammar of Indonesian within the pargram framework: Theoretical and implementational challenges

This paper discusses theoretical and implementational challenges in developing a deep grammar of Indonesian (IndoGram) within the lexical-functional grammar (LFG)-based Parallel Grammar (ParGram) framework, using the Xerox Linguistic Environment (XLE) parser. The ParGram project involves developing and processing computational grammars in parallel to test the LFG's theoretical claims of language universality, while at the same time testing its robustness to handle typologically quite different languages. Two relevant cases are discussed: voice-related morphosyntactic derivation and crossed-control dependency in Indonesian. It will be demonstrated that parallelism should be taken as a matter of degree, that it cannot always be maintained for good language-specific reasons and that the participation of IndoGram has also contributed to the rethinking and improvement of certain parallelism standards.