Restricting logic grammars with government-binding theory
Edward P. Stabler · 1987
This paper will not delve into this controversy, but will just show how some of the constraints proposed recently by Chomsky and others - constraints to which all human languages are thought to conform - can very easily be enforced in a parsing system that allows an elegant grammar notation. These grammars will be called restricted logic grammars (RLGs). Two well known logic grammar formalisms, definite clause grammars (DCGs) and extraposition grammars (XGs), will be briefly reviewed, and then RLGs will be introduced by showing how they differ from XGs. RLGs have a new type of rule ("switch rules") that is of particular value in the definition of natural languages, and the automatic enforcement of some of Chomsky's constraints makes RLG movement rules simpler than XGs'. We follow the work of Marcus (1981), Betwick (1980), Wehrli (1984) and others in pursuing this strategy of restricting the grammar formalism by enforcing Chomsky's constraints, but we use a simple nondeterministic top-down backtracking parsing method with lookahead, rather than Marcus's deterministic LR(k,t)-like parsing method. This approach to parsing, which has been developed in logic Copyright1987 by the Association for Computational Linguistics. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made for direct commercial advantage and the eL reference and this copyright notice are included on the first page. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission