  Dependency Grammar has been used by linguists as the basis of the syntactic
components of their grammar formalisms. It has also been used in natural
language parsing. In China, attempts have been made to use this grammar
formalism to parse Chinese sentences using corpus-based techniques. This paper
reviews the properties of Dependency Grammar as embodied in four axioms for the
well-formedness conditions for dependency structures. It is shown that allowing
multiple governors as done by some followers of this formalism is unnecessary.
The practice of augmenting Dependency Grammar with functional labels is also
discussed in the light of building functional structures when the sentence is
parsed. This will also facilitate semantic interpretation.
