Scrambling as the Combination of Relaxed Context-Free Grammars in a Model-Theoretic Grammar Formalism

Recently (Rogers, 2004), there have been attempts to step out of the shadow of GES, and to use MTS not only to reformulate and compare existing frameworks, but to utilize the more declarative, clarifying perspective of MTS to also explore extensions of them. This is what we set out to do in this paper as well. We base our work on the model-theoretic meta grammar formalism of Extensible Dependency Grammar (XDG) (Debusmann, 2006). XDG can be used to axiomatize grammatical theories based on dependency grammar, to extend them, and to implement them using the constraint-based XDG Development Kit (XDK) (Debusmann et al., 2004), (Debusmann and Duchier, 2007). XDG is novel in supporting the axiomatization of multi-dimensional grammatical theories, where the linguistic aspects of e.g. syntax and semantics can be modeled modularly by separate dependency analyses.