Grammars as Parsing Formalisms: Narrowing the Competence-Performance Gap In this talk I shall introduce a novel grammar formalism, Dynamic Syntax, that models natural languages as mechanisms for incrementally building up context-relative semantic representations following the dynamics of the parse process. I shall introduce basic properties of the formalism as applied to English and to Japanese and then show how these can be used not only to model properties of an incremental parser for Japanese, but also to provide a basis for explaining structural properties of Japanese that are widely thought to be problematic. These include the difference between short and long distance scrambling, the puzzle of multiple long-distance scrambling, and the so-called proper binding constraint. I shall conclude by showing how these same basic concepts of tree growth can be used as a basis for a typology of left-periphery effects, and also to explore the asymmetry between these and right-periphery effects, the difference between them emerging from the different point in the parsing process at which the tree-growth processes are used.
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