[syllogism]

> Certainly. But you are not mentioning the other elephant in the room: Dutch is a free word order language and also permits very liberal ordering in the middle field. The rule-based grammar may benefit from the detailed constraints in the lexical attribute-value structures.

Mostly I didn't want to stick my neck out :p. It's easy to say something untrue about a language you don't know and haven't worked with.

I'd also be reluctant to assume which mechanisms were making a difference, because it's so hard to guess what cases are frequent and not easily inferred by a statistical model. One thing we can know is that the transition based parsers are best at producing projective dependency trees. The various techniques for non-projective shift-reduce parsing aren't very good.

Don't get me wrong --- I totally think the suggestion you offered makes sense, and it's a likely explanation. It's just that this stuff all very tricky.