Grammatical Formalism And Statistical Analysis To The Aid Of Syntactic Theory And Syntactic Practice

The report presents the results of a study of the phrase structure of the Bulgarian complex-compound sentence through the use of constituent grammar of the Bulgarian language and the opportunities arising from the Government and Binding theory - the Bulgarian version. On the basis of an empirical sample of 200 sentences from the novel Antichrist written by Emilian Stanev primary sketches of 200 phrase structures are drawn using accepted formalism as well as a hybrid type of formal-functional analysis, referred to as configuration analysis. A corpus of syntactic treebanks is created and data are provided about various quantity parameters - lexical and functional branches in the structure, frequency of functional types, scope and depth of the sentence structure and many others. By use of statistical predictive methods the validity of established results is proven for the whole text of the novel.