Thanks Dan for figuring out the cause of the problem. And I am looking forward to the new release of the grammar :-) Best, Yi <div>On 7/12/07, Dan Flickinger <<a href="mailto:danf@csli.stanford.edu">danf@csli.stanford.edu</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Hi Sergio and Yi - I tracked down a bug in the ERG which led to this crashing of PET for the example you gave - in fact, also for the simpler example      "We explained to kim why abrams arrives." The source of the problem is that "why" is not properly constraining its specifier (as in "exactly why") properly.  In particular (ignore the rest of this paragraph if you don't care about the grammar-internal behavior), the phrase "to kim" is incorrectly being allowed as a specifier, and this unexpected demand on "to kim" as a specifier can lead to nontermination in the parser, due to the analysis of non-local dependencies as in "too beautiful to ignore" where "too" licenses a VP/NP somewhere later in the sentence, which means it has to pass up this demand for a complement to the phrase that "too" is a specifier for.  It is this general mechanism that passes deferred complements up from specifier to phrase that is not yet completely debugged, and sadly this can in principle still lead to nontermination for certain ordinary-looking sentences. I have corrected this flaw in the new version of the ERG which I am planning to release tomorrow, and I'm grateful that you helped to identify such an embarrassing black hole in the grammar before I issued the release. Sorry to have contributed to the bewildering behavior.  Please try the new version of the grammar once I check it in.   Dan </blockquote></div>