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

TL;DR

This paper proposes a unified formal system combining Phrase Structure, Dependency, and Categorial Grammars to analyze both continuous and discontinuous structures in natural language, aiming to reconcile different linguistic theories.

Contribution

It introduces a novel unified mathematical framework that integrates three major grammatical formalisms to analyze linguistic structures involving continuity and discontinuity.

Findings

Unified analysis of discontinuous and continuous structures

Mathematical derivation combining three formalisms

Potential for cross-linguistic application

Abstract

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.