Discontinuous-constituent Phrase Structure Grammar (DCPSG) (distinct from Discontinuous Phrase Structure Grammar/DPSG) is a formalism for describing discontinuous phrase structures in natural language, such as verb phrases in VSO languages. The formalism was introduced in the slightly more constrained form of Discontinuous-constituent Phrase Structure Grammar with Subscripts and Deletes (DCPSGsd) in Harman (1963).Harman, Gilbert H. 1963. Generative Grammars without Transformation Rules: A Defense of Phrase Structure. Language 39(4), 597-616. DCPSGs describe a superset of the context-free languages, by means of rewrite rules that permit a limited amount of wrapping, similar to that found in Head grammar.

Description

Rewrite rules of a DCPSG are identical to those of a CFG, with the addition of a meta-symbol, denoted here as an underscore. DCPSG rules therefore have the general form where is a string of terminal symbols and/or non-terminal symbols and at most one underscore.

The rewrite semantics of DCPSG are identical as those of a CFG when the rule being used does not contain an underscore: given a rule , an occurrence of may be rewritten as .

For rules with an underscore, the rewrite semantics are slightly different: given a rule , an occurrence of can be rewritten as , with being inserted immediately after the next non-terminal that is introduced at the same time. Using strict left-most productions, is simply inserted immediately after the non-terminal that follows prior to the rewrite.

Example

We can characterize the gross sentence structure of a VSO language such as Irish with the following rules (substituting English words for Irish words, and using subscripts solely for demonstration of discontinuity):

S -> VP\ NP_{subj}

VP -> ITV ~|~ TV \ \_ \ NP_{obj}

NP -> \it{John} ~|~ \it{Susan} ~|~ ...

ITV -> \it{ran} ~|~ \it{danced} ~|~ ...

TV -> \it{saw} ~|~ \it{met} ~|~ ...

A derivation for the sentence saw John Susan, where John is the subject, and Susan is the direct object forming a VP with saw is:

S -> VP\ NP_{subj} -> TV\ NP_{subj} NP_{obj} -> \mathit{saw}\ NP_{subj}\ NP_{obj} -> \mathit{saw}\ \mathit{John}\ NP_{obj} -> \mathit{saw}\ \mathit{John}\ \mathit{Mary}

References