Discontinuous Grammar

This book presents a new model of human language,§human parsing, and human language learning. It§provides a detailed§formal account of a§wide range of linguistic phenomena, including§discontinuous word§order, secondary dependencies, parasitic gaps,§elliptic coordinations,§punctuation, and important aspects of morphology and§discourse. The§book argues for a probabilistic model of language,§and proposes a§psycholinguistically motivated non-projective§dependency parsing§algorithm that can take advantage of the§probabilistic model.§§The book falls within the tradition of dependency§grammar, but§differs from dependency theories such as Word§Grammar, Functional Generative Description, and§Meaning Text Theory by building on a purely§probabilistic conception of human language,§and by providing a unified account of computational§linguistics, psycholinguistics, and linguistics.§The§theory has been used as the basis for the 100,000§word Danish§Dependency Treebank and the Copenhagen Dependency§Treebank for§Danish-English.§§The book is targeted towards researchers and students§working within§computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and§linguistics.