Abstract
An important challenge for natural language parsers is the phenomenon of free word order. In languages exhibiting this phenomenon—and it seems that all languages do have free ordering to some extent—the words in a sentence may swap about freely with little effect on meaning. It also appears that no language is completely free, so for a parser to properly handle this phenomenon, it must be able to accept sentences that vary where they may and that do not vary where they may not. In this chapter, I will present a parser that works well for a part of Warlpiri, an Aboriginal language from central Australia, that exhibits a great deal of free word order. It is believed that the same underlying mechanism will also handle more fixed word order languages like English.
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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Kashket, M.B. (1991). Parsing Warlpiri—A Free Word Order Language. In: Berwick, R.C., Abney, S.P., Tenny, C. (eds) Principle-Based Parsing. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 44. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3474-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3474-3_5
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