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The paper describes a system that can automatically generate tree adjoining grammars from abstract specifications. Our system is based on the use of tree descriptions to specify a grammar by separately defining pieces of tree structure that encode independent syntactic principles. Various individual specifications are then combined to form the elementary trees of the grammar. The system enables efficient development and maintenance of a grammar, and also allows underlying linguistic constructions (such as wh-movement) to be expressed explicitly. We have carefully designed our system to be as language independent as possible and tested its performance by constructing both English and Chinese grammars, with significant reductions in grammar development time. Provably consistent abstract specifications for different languages also offer unique opportunities for investigating how languages relate to themselves and to each other. For instance, the impact of a linguistic structure such as wh-movement can be traced from its specification to the descriptions that it combines with, to its actual realization in trees. By focusing on syntactic properties at a higher level, our approach allowed a unique comparison of our English and Chinese grammars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]