Towards a Unified System of Representation for Continuity and Discontinuity in Natural Language
This work addresses a foundational issue in linguistic theory for researchers, but it appears incremental as it combines existing formalisms without demonstrating broad empirical gains.
The paper tackles the problem of syntactic discontinuity in natural language by proposing a unified representation system that integrates Phrase Structure Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Categorial Grammar, aiming to analyze both continuous and discontinuous structures through a single mathematical derivation.
Syntactic discontinuity is a grammatical phenomenon in which a constituent is split into more than one part because of the insertion of an element which is not part of the constituent. This is observed in many languages across the world such as Turkish, Russian, Japanese, Warlpiri, Navajo, Hopi, Dyirbal, Yidiny etc. Different formalisms/frameworks in current linguistic theory approach the problem of discontinuous structures in different ways. Each framework/formalism has widely been viewed as an independent and non-converging system of analysis. In this paper, we propose a unified system of representation for both continuity and discontinuity in structures of natural languages by taking into account three formalisms, in particular, Phrase Structure Grammar (PSG) for its widely used notion of constituency, Dependency Grammar (DG) for its head-dependent relations, and Categorial Grammar (CG) for its focus on functor-argument relations. We attempt to show that discontinuous expressions as well as continuous structures can be analysed through a unified mathematical derivation incorporating the representations of linguistic structure in these three grammar formalisms.