A language-independent framework for syntac- tic finlte-state parsing is discussed. The article presents a framework, a formalism, a compiler and a parser for grammars written in this for- realism. As a substantial example, fragments from a nontrivial finite-state grammar of Eng- lish are discussed. The linguistic framework of the present approach is based on a surface syntactic tag- ging scheme by F. Karlsson. This representa- tion is slightly less powerful than phrase structure tree notation, letUng some ambigu- ous constructions be described more concisely. The finite-state rule compiler implements what was briefly sketched by Koskenniemi (1990). It is based on the calculus of finite-state machines. The compiler transforms rules into rule-automata. The run-time parser exploits one of ce...

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