Towards a Unified System of Representation for Continuity and Discontinuity in Natural Language

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Kandala, Ratna, Mondal, Prakash
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Kandala, Ratna
Mondal, Prakash
author_facet Kandala, Ratna
Mondal, Prakash
contents 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.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_05235
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards a Unified System of Representation for Continuity and Discontinuity in Natural Language
Kandala, Ratna
Mondal, Prakash
Computation and Language
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.
title Towards a Unified System of Representation for Continuity and Discontinuity in Natural Language
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05235