The present invention provides a method and a parser for syntactically analyzing an input string. The parser applies a plurality of rules which describe syntactic properties of the language of the input strings. The plurality of rules comprise two types of rules. A first type of rules comprises immediate dominance rules and linear precedence rules. A second type of rules being sequence rules. All rules of the plurality of rules are applied according to a predefined order to the input string. This new incremental parsing architecture has advantages with respect to grammar engineering and allows a more efficient parsing.