How to define a context-free backbone for DGs: Implementing a DG in the LFG formalism

Abstract

This paper presents a multidimensional Dependency Grammar (DG), which decouples the dependency tree from word order, such that surface ordering is not determined by traversing the dependency tree. We develop the notion of a \emph{word order domain structure}, which is linked but structurally dissimilar to the syntactic dependency tree. We then discuss the implementation of such a DG using constructs from a unification-based phrase-structure approach, namely Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). Particular attention is given to the analysis of discontinuities in DG in terms of LFG's functional uncertainty.