Parsing By Chunks

Abstract

I begin with an intuition: when I read a sentence, I read it a chunk at a time. For example, the previous sentence breaks up something like this:

• (1) [I begin] [with an intuition]: [when I read] [a sentence], [I read it] [a chunk] [at a time]

These chunks correspond in some way to prosodic patterns. It appears, for instance, that the strongest stresses in the sentence fall one to a chunk, and pauses are most likely to fall between chunks. Chunks also represent a grammatical watershed of sorts. The typical chunk consists of a single content word surrounded by a constellation of function words, matching a fixed template. A simple context-free grammar is quite adequate to describe the structure of chunks. By contrast, the relationships between chunks are mediated more by lexical selection than by rigid templates. Co-occurrence of chunks is determined not just by their syntactic categories, but is sensitive to the precise words that head them; and the order in which chunks occur is much more flexible than the order of words within chunks.