Editing Dependency grammar (section)

{{Short description|Class of modern grammatical theories}}
{{Linguistics|Theoretical frameworks}}

'''Dependency grammar''' ('''DG''') is a class of modern [[Grammar|grammatical]] theories that are all based on the dependency relation (as opposed to the ''constituency relation'' of [[Phrase structure grammar|phrase structure]]) and that can be traced back primarily to the work of [[Lucien Tesnière]]. Dependency is the notion that linguistic units, e.g. words, are connected to each other by directed links. The (finite) verb is taken to be the structural center of clause structure. All other syntactic units (words) are either directly or indirectly connected to the verb in terms of the directed links, which are called ''dependencies''. Dependency grammar differs from [[phrase structure grammar]] in that while it can identify phrases it tends to overlook phrasal nodes. A dependency structure is determined by the relation between a word (a [[Head (linguistics)|head]]) and its dependents. Dependency structures are flatter than phrase structures in part because they lack a [[finite verb|finite]] [[verb phrase]] [[constituent (linguistics)|constituent]], and they are thus well suited for the analysis of languages with free word order, such as [[Czech language|Czech]] or [[Warlpiri language|Warlpiri]].