Abstract

Dislocation phenomena in natural language can be, and often are, thought of as the effects of movement transformations. We propose to handle these phenomena in terms of parser combinators [3, 8] that transform recursive descent parsers for a ‘deep structure language’ into parsers for a ‘surface structure language’. This combinator approach to extraction keeps close to the ‘movement’ intuition and gives a computational account of the well known island constraints on extraction first proposed in [7].