Chinese numbers, MIX, scrambling, and range concatenation grammars

Abstract

The notion of mild context-sensitivity was formulated in an attempt to express the formal power which is both necessary and sufficient to define the syntax of natural languages. However, some linguistic phenomena such as Chinese numbers and German word scrambling lie beyond the realm of mildly context-sensitive formalisms. On the other hand, the class of range concatenation grammars provides added power w.r.t, mildly context-sensitive grammars while keeping a polynomial parse time behavior. In this report, we show that this increased power can be used to define the above-mentioned linguistic phenomena with a polynomial parse time of a very low degree.