Based on the analysis of the usage and the syntactic function of Chinese punctuations,this paper proposes a new hierarchical approach to parse the long Chinese sentences.In traditional parsing approaches,the parsing procedure is performed in an one-level way and the punctuation marks are not specially treated.Correspondingly,in our approach,the complex long Chinese sentences are broken into sub-sentences or units(say 'units' hereafter) by using punctuation marks with special functions,so that the original whole sentence is parsed unit by unit.This idea of 'divide-and-conquer' greatly reduces the difficulty in the traditional parsing approaches to recognize the syntactic relationship between the sub-sentences and phrases or inside the sub-sentences or phrases.And also,in our approach,the grammatical rules with punctuation marks and their probabilities are extracted from the large scale treebank,which are very beneficial to the syntactic disambiguation.Our experimental results have shown that comparing with the traditional Chart parsing algorithm,our approach can significantly reduce the time consumption and the numbers of ambiguous edges,and get about 7% of the correct rate and the recall rate increasing while parsing long Chinese sentences.