Literal Movement Grammars

Abstract

Literal movement grammars (LMGs) provide a general account of extraposition phenomena through an attribute mechanism allowing top-down displacement of syntactical information. LMGs provide a simple and efficient treatment of complex linguistic phenomena such as cross-serial dependencies in German and Dutch---separating the treatment of natural language into a parsing phase closely resembling traditional context-free treatment, and a disambiguation phase which can be carried out using matching, as opposed to full unification employed in most current grammar formalisms of linguistical relevance.