Phrase Structure and Intonation Breaks

We outline the phrase structure component of a theory of the human language faculty called Description Theory (D-theory), substantially revising the theory presented in [Marcus, Hindle and Fleck '83]. It sketches aspects of a (proposed) parser for natural language that embodies D-theory, and then prsents new formal analyses of aspects of parentheticals and discontinuous constituents in both English and Japanese which follow from this theory.