Do FTFs rely on ICE-GB or the ICE grammar?
No. FTFs necessarily reflect the topology of a particular grammar – the structural rules that define what kinds of relations are possible in a grammatical ‘tree’ – because an FTF is a kind of ‘abstract tree’. We developed FTFs in the context of a particular grammar. (It is hard to see how a grammatical query system could be evaluated by linguists unless it was developed in this way!) But that does not mean we cannot then advance towards a universal system from our current more specialised one. We would rather move toward such a system from our current practice-based starting point rather than abstractly defining parameters for universal grammatical queries. We believe that as far as possible, any system has to be usable by non-specialists. Moreover, this does not mean that current FTFs could not be modified relatively easily to work with other phrase-structure grammars (this covers most parsed corpora in the world today). We have been also looking at how FTFs might work with constraint
