Some Methods of Describing Discontinuity in Polish and Their Cost-Effectiveness

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present some methods of handling discontinuity (and freer word order in general) within a medium-level grammatical framework. A context-free formalism and the “backbone” set of rules for verbal phrases are presented as the background for this paper. The main result consists in showing how discontinuous infinitive phrases and discontinuous noun phrases (interrogative phrases included) can be theoretically covered within the introduced formalism and similar grammatical frameworks. The second result reported in this paper is the cost-effectiveness analysis of introducing discontinuity rules into a medium-level grammatical framework: it turns out that attempting to cover some types of discontinuity may be unprofitable within a given grammatical framework. Although only examples from the Polish language are discussed, the described solutions are likely to be relevant for other languages with similar word order properties.