[texhax] making brackets (linguistics)

[Uwe Lück]

[strange, failed to send it to texhax yesterday. actually, Paul Isambert is 
a linguist reading this list. "making brackets" even seems not to express 
connection with linguistics! -- Uwe.]

At 13:46 07.04.10, Marcia Beach wrote:

>Susan and Uwe:  I am referring to the large brackets that embrace lines of 
>text in HPSG.     Also I need the "greater than" and "lesser-than" angled 
>brackets that also embrace lines of text.  Am trying to see if it can be 
>done in Word 2007, since those are just about all the symbols I 
>need.  Perhaps I won't have to download the whole LaTex program if I can 
>figure out a way to do it in Word.  Am generally quite non-techy when it 
>comes to these things.  Thank you both for your suggestions.   Marcia

So we see what you need on

     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-driven_phrase_structure_grammar

(in my view) different kinds of diagrams are in the German version

     http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-driven_Phrase_Structure_Grammar

(You must not assume that linguists read this mailing list.)

I don't know if this can be achieved with Word. Even with TeX it is not 
very easy for me right now. There may be special packages for this at

     http://mirror.ctan.org/help/Catalogue/bytopic.html#misctables

especially bigdelim or delarray. A special HPSG package may be valuable, 
but I can't find any and ... LingTrees seems to have some HPSG 
functionality (p. 14):

     http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/LingTrees/lingtrees.doc.pdf

as well as xyling (p. 19):

     ftp://tug.ctan.org/pub/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/xyling/xyli-doc.pdf

That special "bracket" notation seems to be implemented by avm.sty 
(attribute-value matrices) seemingly belonging to the LingTrees bundle. I 
can't find its original documentation avm-doc, but in searching I found 
this overview by Christina Thiele in a TUGboat from 1995

     http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb16-1/tb46ling.pdf

maybe someone else finds something more recent like this.

HTH -- Uwe.