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The semantic formula (1) describes a predication in which the predicate read has two arguments, an
agent (I) and a patient (book). Predicates may be associated with operators such as tense (Pres:
present), aspect (Perf: perfect), modality (Pot: potential) or number (pl: plural).
The predication (1) is equivalent to the D-tree below, in which operators have been rendered as
features of the form ATTRIBUTE=VALUE, while the predicates read, I and book appear as values of a
feature lex:
A D-Tree such as this one is displayed by FGW in the following way:
--<1> MAIN: read
|--<2> Agent: I
|--<3> Patient: book
FEATURE MATRICES
================
<1>: [lex=read,tense=Pres,modality=Pot,aspect=Perf]
<2>: [lex=I]
<3>: [lex=book,definiteness=d, num=pl]
The process of syntactic realization consists of the application of successive cycles of rules that
modify this initial tree, by adding new features or new nodes, by changing the dependence of the
existing node, or by applying a linear order to its nodes.
a) Lexical Expansion:
In this phase, each feature matrix in the D-tree is expanded by adding to it all the features associated
in the lexicon to its lex (predicate). For the predicate read, for example, these features might be
cat=V (lexical category = verb), vclass=trans (transitive) and sem=action. See § 5 for more
information.
The result of this expansion is shown below, with the new features at the end of each feature matrix:
--<1> MAIN: read
|--<2> Agent: I
|--<3> Patient: book
FEATURE MATRICES
================
<1>: [lex=read,tense=Pres,modality=Pot,aspect=Perf,cat=V,vclass=trans]
<2>: [lex=I,cat=PP,per=1,num=sg]
<3>: [lex=book,definiteness=d, num=pl,cat=N,per=3]