Towards a Uniform Treatment of Swedish Verb Syntax and Semantics Bjrn Gambck Natural Language Processing Group Swedish Institute of Computer Science Box 1263, S - 164 28 Kista, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: gam@sics.se; telephone: +46 — 8 — 752 15 05 Abstract The paper discusses how different types of Swedish verbs can be treated uniformly by a rule schema approach to grammar in a unification based framework. The virtues of the method are exemplified at the syntactic and lexical levels, while the paper shows that some problems still occur in the semantics, mainly when aiming for a treatment which includes all types of auxiliaries. The theory outlined here incorporates the semantic information added by for example tense and modal auxiliaries as specific parameters in the verb semantics and relies on complicated subcategorization schemes to be treated by the lexicon, thus keeping the grammar rules as simple as possible. 1. Introduction From a theoretical view-point, the aim of the work described in the present paper is to establish a uniform treatment of Swedish verb-phrases of any kind, be it with or without modification or with different types of verbal complements. Reaching that goal, a unification based grammar theory has been essential, but before going into details of the theory, this first section will start out by describing the framework in which the theory has been built. The rest of the paper is then laid out as follows: Section 2 discusses the syntactic treatment of verb-phrase formation as well as different types of Swedish verbs. The semantic part of the treatment is addressed in Section 3, while Section 4 deals with negation — a subject which will be excluded from the discussion in the first sections. Section 5, finally, sums up the paper and points to areas where further improvements may be possible. The grammar treatment outlined in the paper has to quite a large extent been influenced by the fact that it was going to be implemented in a actual computer system, in the Swedish grammar used in an English-to-Swedish speech-to- speech translation prototype called the Spoken Language Translator, SLT