Towards a platform for linearization grammars

A number of authors working in the HPSG paradigm (Reape, 1990, 1994, 1996; Richter and Sailer, 1995; Kathol, 1995; Müller, 1995, 1999a; Penn, 1999, and others) have argued on linguistic grounds that constituent structure should not be directly linked to word order properties. While the formal realizations of the proposals differ, all these so-called linearization approaches have in common that they allow constituents to be discontinuous, i.e., they do not cover a continuous stretch of phonological or graphemic material.1 On the computational side, some algorithms for parsing grammars licensing such discontinuous constituents have been proposed (Johnson, 1985; Reape, 1991; van Noord, 1991). A computational encoding of an HPSG linearization grammar for German is discussed in Müller (1996). The BABEL system described implements the HPSG linearization theory of Müller (1999a) in Prolog and uses a basic parser for discontinuous constituents for processing with this grammar.