Abstract Kempen
We present a linearization model that captures a broad range of constituent order phenomena in clauses of Dutch, English and German: clause union, cross-serial dependencies, scrambling, verb clusters, wh-fronting, extraction, and extraposition. The model is part of the psycholinguistically motivated formalism of Performance Grammar (PG), which has separate components for assembling the hierarchical and the linear structure of sentences. A few narrowly localized, relatively minor variations of the model suffice to account for a great deal of the -- sometimes widely diverging -- word order patterns in the three target languages. This is the first reason for calling our approach `uniform'. The other reason is that the system allows the above linear order phenomena to be viewed as manifestations of the same basic mechanism called topology sharing. Here, a topology is a one-dimensional array containing a limited number of left-to-right positions (`slots') for clausal constituents (cf. the `topological fields' of traditional German grammar). Topologies at adjacent levels of the syntactic hierarchy sometimes share left- and/or right-peripheral slots, which gives rise to restricted upward `movement' of the slot fillers. A computational implementation of a PG for Dutch, the Performance Grammar Workbench, is available for demonstration.Last modified $Date: 2001/10/04 13:39:46 $ by Parlevink Webmaster