Competence and Performance Grammar in Incremental Processing

The goal of this paper is to explore some consequences of the dichotomy between competence and performance from the point of view of incrementality. We introduce a TAG-based formalism that encodes a strong notion of incrementality directly into the operations of the formal system. A left-associative operation is used to build a lexicon of extended elementary trees. Extended elementary trees allow derivations in which a single fully connected structure is mantained through the course of a left-to-right word-by-word derivation. In the paper, we describe the consequences of this view for semantic interpretation, and we also evaluate some of the computational consequences of enlarging the lexicon in this way.

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