The aim of the present paper is to show how a rule-based parser for the Italian language has been extended to analyze sentences involving conjunctions. The most noticeable fact is the ease with ~4nich the required modifications fit in the previous parser structure. In particular, the rules written for analyzing simple sentences (without conjunctions) needed only small changes. On the contrary, more substantial changes were made to the e~oeption-handling rules (called "natural changes") that are used to restructure the tree in case of failure of a syntactic hypothesis. .
