Local constraints on Arabic word order

Syntactic analysis of Arabic poses two major problems, (i) Although the canonical order of Arabic sentences is VSO, a range of other orders are possible. In order to carry out such an analysis, then, it is necessary to have a grammatical framework and an associated parsing algorithm that can cope with free word order, (ii) Although a range of non-canonical orders are possible, not all orders are possible under all circumstances. The current paper outlines an approach to obtaining syntactic descriptions of sentences of Modern Standard Arabic, where the problems outlined above are compounded by omission of short vowels and other critical information from the written form. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.