A Formal Look at Dependency Grammars and Phrase-Structure Grammars, with Special Consideration of Word-Order Phenomena

Abstract

The central role of the lexicon in Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) and other dependency-based linguistic theories cannot be replicated in linguistic theories based on context-free grammars (CFGs). We describe Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) as a system that arises naturally in the process of lexicalizing CFGs. A TAG grammar can therefore be compared directly to an Meaning-Text Model (MTM). We illustrate this point by discussing the computational complexity of certain non-projective constructions, and suggest a way of incorporating locality of word-order definitions into the Surface-Syntactic Component of MTT.