SGML: SYNTEXT ("SGML Grammar Grapher")

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Date: Tue, 21 May 1996 13:36:00 -0500

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SYNTEXT is an SGML DTD providing elements and attributes to mark up text in
English for:

- syntactic structure, including
          o X-bar based parsing, with Government and Binding-style PRO and "t"
          o grammatical relations a la Quirk et al. marked as attributes
- cohesion
- coreference
- conjunctive relations as attributes of sentence specifiers
- lexical cohesion as attributes of lexical items
- rhetorical figures

Any text marked up for these features and identifying itself as DOCTYPE SYNTEXT
is an SGML document and can be browsed in a SGML browser or viewer such as
SoftQuad's free Windows browser Panorama or the costwish viewer for X
Window being developed by Peter Murray-Rust.

SYNTEXT is an SGML application. It provides markup for the analysis of
syntactic and textual structure;  a marked up text can be viewed in tree and
other modes and can be searched with context sensitive and contingent scans,
making it very powerful for stylistic analysis (once a passage is marked
up!)  The DTD is easily modifiable and can be very useful as a test bed for
rule writing in syntax courses. The X Window version can use Nick Ing-Simmons'
Text To Speech synthesizer rsynth to speak any word, phrase, or sentence
displayed by clicking on it. The X/costwish version can display nodes by
catgory name, content, or grammatical relations.

The SYNTEXT Home Page is at
	http://weber.u.washington.edu/~syntext

Documentation and packages including sample marked up texts can be found there.
This is a new program, very alpha.

I would be delighted to get more samples, or critique/improvements of the
rules.

George L. Dillon (dillon@u.washington.edu)
16 May 1996