Syntax coordination: interaction of discourse and extrapositions

The model presented here for parsing spoken German offers a way to proceed incrementally discontinuous constructions. Typical constructions in task oriented dialogs are Extrapositions to the right . These are defined as syntactical constructions where a constituent is extraposed in the Nachfeld . Basing on the assumption that the extraposed constituent is not part of the source sentence the model works by coordinating the syntactical information given by the source sentence and the extraposed constituent to complete the extaposed constituent to a whole sentence. Therefore, the standard LR(1)-parser is extended by two additional actions. The parsing strategy works by deriving the first part of the construction until the extraposed constituent is reached. The both new actions enable the parser to proceed further by taking the syntactical information of the source sentence to complete the extraposed constituent to a sentence of its own. The repeated use of these actions guarantees that every intended reading will be performed.