Parsing as tree construction

In this paper a model is introduced in which parsing can be represented for a number of different frameworks, the essential condition being that the terms representing the meaning of an NL string derive from the representations associated with the words of the string through some (binary) operation of composition. In that case parsing can be represented as tree construction. The claim of the paper is that there are linguistic phenomena, like long distance dependencies which have their proper explanation in the process of tree construction, i.e., independent of the underlying grammatical framework. By consequence, this model can treat long distance dependencies in Categorial Grammar without discharge and in feature structures without the slash feature.

Wilfried Meyer Viol