The work reported here has largely involved problems with parsing Italian. One of the typical features of Italian is a lower degree of word order rigidity in sentences. For instance, "Paolo ama Maria" (Paolo loves Maria) may be rewritten without any significant difference in meaning (leaving aside questions of context and pragmatics) in any the six possible permutations: Paolo ama Maria, Paolo Maria ama, Maria ama Paolo, Maria Paolo ama, ama Paolo Maria, ama Maria Paolo. Although Subject-Verb-Object is a statistically prevalent construction, all variations in word order can occur inside a component, and they may depend on the.
