Constraint grammar as a framework for parsing running text

idea is to maximize the use of morphological information for parsing purposes. All relevant structure is assigned directly via lexicon, morphology, and simple mappings from morphology to syntax. The task of the constraints is basically to discard as many alternatives as possible, the optimum being a fully disambiguated sentence with one syntactic reading only. The second central idea is to treat morphological disambiguation and syntactic labelling by the same mechanism of discarding improper alternatives. 168 A good parsing formalism should satisfy many requirements: the constraints should be declarative rather than procedural, they should be able to cope with any real-world text-sentence (i.e. with running text, not just with linguists laboratory sentences), they should be clearly separated from the program code by which they are executed, the formalism should be language-independent, it should be reasonably easy to implement (optimally as finite-state automata), and it should als