Abstract. In this paper I discuss several possible analyses for constituent order in German. Approaches that assume continuous constituents are compared with an approach that assumes discontinuous constituents. I will show that certain proposals that have been made to analyze constituent order are either not adequate or cannot be implemented with currently available systems. For the proposals that can be implemented I will discuss the amount of work a parser has to do. I then compare two implementations of larger fragments of German: the Verbmobil grammar and the Babel grammar. It is shown that the amount of work to be done to parse the Verbmobil grammar is significantly higher than the work that has to be done parsing with the Babel grammar. Key words: German, HPSG, implementation, linearization, parsing 1.

Licenser rules have originally been introduced in Müller (1999) as a part of a grammar based on discontinuous constituents. We propose licenser rules as a means to avoid underspecified empty elements in grammars with continuous constituents. We applied them to a verb movement analysis of the German main clause with right sentence bracket and to complement extraposition. To reduce the number of unnecessary hypotheses, we extended the licenser rule concept with a licenser binding technique. We compared the licenser rule approach to an approach based on underspecified traces with respect to processing performance. In our experiment, the use of licenser rules reduced the parse time by a factor of 13.5.