Developing a minimalist parser for free word order languages with discontinuous constituency

Abstract

We propose a parser based on ideas from the Minimalist Programme. The parser supports free word order languages and simulates a human listener who necessarily begins sentence analysis before all the words in the sentence have become available. We first sketch the problems that free word order languages pose. Next we discuss an existing framework for minimalist parsing, and show how it is difficult to make it work for free word order languages and simulate realistic syntactic conditions. We briefly describe a formalism and a parsing algorithm that elegantly overcome these difficulties, and we illustrate them with detailed examples from Latin, a language whose word order freedom causes it to exhibit seemingly difficult discontinuous noun phrase situations.