Free Word Order in Sanskrit and Well-nestedness.

The common wisdom about Sanskrit is that it is free word order language. This word order poses challenges such as handling non-projectivity in parsing. The earlier works on the word order of Sanskrit have shown that there are syntactic structures in Sanskrit which cannot be covered under even the non-planarity. In this paper, we study these structures further to investigate if they can fall under well-nestedness or not. A small manually tagged corpus of the verses of ´Sr ¯ ımad-Bhagavad-G ¯ ıt ¯ a (BhG) was considered for this study. It was noticed that there are as many well-nested trees as there are ill-nested ones. From the linguistic point of view, we could get a list of relations that are involved in the planarity violations. All these relations had one thing in common—that they have unilateral expectancy. It was this loose binding, as against the mutual expectancy with certain other relations, that allowed them to cross the phrasal boundaries.