Performance Grammar

Performance Grammar (PG) is a psycholinguistically motivated grammar formalism. It aims to describe and explain intuitive judgments and other data concerning the well-formedness of sentences of a language, but at the same time it contributes to accounts of syntactic processing phenomena observable during language comprehension and language production.

Garrett (1975) identifies two stages of syntactic processing: an early `functional' and a later `positional' stage. This distinction has since been adopted by most students of language production (e.g., see (Bock and Levelt 1994)). Accordingly, we assume that syntactic tree formation in PG is a two--stage process. First, an unordered hierarchical structure (`mobile') is assembled out of lexical building blocks. The key operation at work here is feature unification, which also delimits the positional options of the syntactic constituents. During the second step, the branches of the mobile are temporally arranged by a `read-out' module that realizes one positional option of every constituent.

For recent papers on the formalism of Performance Grammar see:

• Tree Adjoining Grammar without Adjoining? The case of scrambling in German
  G. Kempen and K. Harbusch
  in the Proceedings of "TAG+4 - Fourth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms", Philadelphia, Pennsylvania/USA, 1998, pp. 80-83 (IRCS Report No. 98-12).
• Complexity of Linear Ordering in Performance Grammar, TAG and HPSG
  K. Harbusch and G. Kempen
  in the Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms, Paris/France, 2000.
• A quantitative model of word order and movement in English, Dutch and German complement constructions
  K. Harbusch and G. Kempen
  in the Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics , Taipei/Taiwan, pp. 328-334, 2002.
• Performance Grammar: A declarative definition
  G. Kempen and K. Harbusch
  in A. Nijholt, M. Theune, H. Hondorp (eds.), Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands 2001. Rodopi, Amsterdam/The Netherlands, 2002.
• Word Order Scrambling as a Consequence of Incremental Sentence Production
  G. Kempen and K. Harbusch
  To appear in Härl, H., Olsen, S. and Tappe, H. (eds.). The syntax-semantics interface: Linguistic structures and interfaces. DeGruyter, Berlin, forthcoming.
• Dutch and German verb clusters in Performance Grammar.
  G. Kempen and K. Harbusch
  In P. Seuren and G. Kempen (eds.). Verb clusters in Dutch and German. Benjamins, Amsterdam/The Netherlands, 2003.
  
  

For a recent powerpoint presentation see: Presentation given at COLING 2002, Taipei/Taiwan