Syntactic Polygraphs. A Formalism Extending Both Constituency and Dependency
Sylvain Kahane, Nicolas Mazziotta · 2015
Syntactic analyses describe grouping operations that explain how words are combined to form utterances.The nature of these operations depends on the approach.In a constituency-based approach, grouping operations are ordered, or stratified, part-whole relations.In a dependency-based approach, grouping operations identify a governor (or head), i.e. they are directed hierarchical relations between words.It is possible to convert a constituency tree into a dependency tree by dereifying the nodes, by identifying the governor and by removing the stratification of the part-whole relations.Polygraphs combine the two types of information into a single structure and are therefore a more powerful formalism.By relaxing constraints, polygraphs also allow to underspecify both kinds of information.