Problems with Parsing Free Ordered, Elliptic Languages

Abstract

Parsing free ordered, elliptic languages raises interesting problems. Korean is a free ordered, verb-final, highly elliptic language, and we will use it for illustration in this paper. We develop some formalism to represent various phenomena that arise in parsing such a language. We will also make suggestions for the implementation of our formalism. Parsing a free ordered language presents different problems from those found in a language like English. In Korean, components are free ordered within a given clause but only within THAT clause. Components from a higher level clause may not interleave those of a lower level clause, such as a relative clause or a complementation. The free ordered clausal structure of Korean reminds one of the block structures of programming languages such as Pascal. Unfortunately, Korean provides no explicit end markers for its "blocks", allowing multiple parses and resultant ambiguity.