Parsing Locative Phrases in Korean: From a Deterministic Viewpoint

Abstract

In parsing head-final languages in a deterministic way, there seem to be some constructions where the transition to the next parse stage appears to violate determinism and yet the constructions do not create any processing difficulty. In this paper, we examine such instances from Korean locative phrases, and explore the possibility of dealing with them deterministically. Even though in general VP-internal locatives are morphologically distinguished from VP-external ones in Korean, there is a case where an identical locative marker can appear in both VP-external and VP-internal position. We claim that such an instance should be considered as two distinct locative markers sharing the same phonetic form by accident, and the human parser is able to handle them without violating determinism, given that deterministic parsing is done by computing descriptions of dominance/precedence relations, rather than by building phrase structure trees directly.