2025/06/05 by Ratna Kandala, Kandala, Ratna, Prakash Mondal +1
Arts and Humanities · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #DNA and Biological Computing #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.05235
openalex publication_date 2025/06/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.