Abstract

In this paper, a lexical functional grammar for an automatic classification of Urdu copula verb hO (be/become) is presented according to linguistic theories. A test suite of sentences containing almost all different conjugation forms of copula verb is extracted from a raw corpus. It is tried to keep only the cases of copular construction because the copula verb hO is very much dynamic in nature of function. The respective syntactic and functional structures of different cases of copular construction are presented, through which the lexical, syntactical and functional information required by copula verb is explored. The explorations made computationally are then compared with the existing linguistic theories as a proof of evaluation. It is an attempt to classify the state-of-the-art dynamic behavior of Urdu copula verb.

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