Abstract

Vijay-Shanker et al. (1987) note that many inter-esting linguistic formalisms can be thought of as hav-ing essentially context-free structure, but operating over objects richer than simple strings (sequences of strings, trees, or graphs). They introduce linear context-free rewriting systems (LCFRS’s, see also Weir (1988)) as a unifying framework for superficially different such formalisms (like (multi compo-nent) tree adjoining grammars, head grammars, and categorial grammars). Later work (Michaelis, 1998) has added minimalist grammars (MGs, see (Stabler, 1997)) to this list. Recently, Fülöp et al. (2004) have introduced multiple bottom-up tree transducers (mbutt), which can be thought of as offering a trans-ductive perspective on LCFRSs. The transductive