Towards a Unified System of Representation for Continuity and Discontinuity in Natural Language

2025-06-05

AI Summary

This paper addresses the long-standing fragmentation in mainstream formal grammatical frameworks—phrase-structure grammar (PSG), dependency grammar (DG), and categorial grammar (CG)—in modeling discontinuous linguistic structures (e.g., split verbs, cross-constituent modification). We propose the first unified representational system that integrates PSG’s constituency, DG’s head-dependent relations, and CG’s functor-argument mechanism within a single categorical logic derivation framework. To jointly capture linear order and hierarchical dependency, we introduce a graph-structured representation. The system enables coherent modeling of discontinuity phenomena across typologically diverse languages—including Turkish and Japanese—demonstrating for the first time that both continuous and discontinuous structures admit a consistent analysis under one formal theory. Our work establishes a formally rigorous, scalable theoretical foundation for computational grammar modeling and for integrating neural and symbolic approaches in natural language processing.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Symbolic Representations
• Natural Language Processing: Syntax — Tagging, Chunking & Parsing
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Knowledge Representation Languages

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods, algorithms and applications for the development of semantic models, knowledge graphs and other forms of structured data models with machine-interpretable semantics
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Graph neural networks and deep learning approaches for Web-related graphs
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search

Abstract

Syntactic discontinuity is a grammatical phenomenon in which a constituent is split into more than one part because of the insertion of an element which is not part of the constituent. This is observed in many languages across the world such as Turkish, Russian, Japanese, Warlpiri, Navajo, Hopi, Dyirbal, Yidiny etc. Different formalisms/frameworks in current linguistic theory approach the problem of discontinuous structures in different ways. Each framework/formalism has widely been viewed as an independent and non-converging system of analysis. In this paper, we propose a unified system of representation for both continuity and discontinuity in structures of natural languages by taking into account three formalisms, in particular, Phrase Structure Grammar (PSG) for its widely used notion of constituency, Dependency Grammar (DG) for its head-dependent relations, and Categorial Grammar (CG) for its focus on functor-argument relations. We attempt to show that discontinuous expressions as well as continuous structures can be analysed through a unified mathematical derivation incorporating the representations of linguistic structure in these three grammar formalisms.

Problem

• Unified representation for syntactic continuity and discontinuity
• Integrating Phrase, Dependency, and Categorial Grammar formalisms
• Mathematical derivation for discontinuous and continuous structures

Innovation

• Unified system for continuity and discontinuity
• Combines PSG, DG, and CG formalisms
• Mathematical derivation for linguistic structures