The desirability of a syntactic parsing component in natural language understanding systems has been the subject of debate for the past several years.This paper describes an approach to automarie text processing which is entirely based on syntactic form.A program is described which processes one genre of discourse, that of newspaper reports.The program creates summaries of reports by relying on an expanded concept of text grounding: certain syntactic structures and tense/ aspect oairs indicate the most important events in a news story.Supportive, background material is also highly coded syntactically.Certain types of information are routinely expressed with distinct syntactic forms.Where more than one episode occurs in a single report, a change of episode will also be marked syntactically in a reliable way.