Discontinuities occur especially frequently in languages with a relatively free word order, such as German. Generally, due to the longdistance dependencies they induce, they lie beyond the expressivity of Probabilistic CFG, i.e., they cannot be directly reconstructed by a PCFG parser. In this paper, we use a parser for Probabilistic Linear Context-Free Rewriting Systems (PLCFRS), a formalism with high expressivity, to directly parse the German NeGra and TIGER treebanks. In both treebanks, discontinuities are annotated with crossing branches. Based on an evaluation using different metrics, we show that an output quality can be achieved which is comparable to the output quality of PCFG-based systems. In most constituency treebanks, sentence annotation is restricted to having the shape of trees without crossing branches, and the non-local dependencies induced by the discontinuities are modeled by an additional mechanism. In the Penn Treebank (PTB) (Marcus et al., 1994), e.g., this mechanism is a combination of special labels and empty nodes, establishing implicit additional edges. In the German TüBa-D/Z (Telljohann et al., 2006), additional edges are established by a combination of topological field annotation and special edge labels. As an example, Fig. 1 shows a tree from TüBa-D/Z with the annotation of (1). Note here the edge label ON-MOD on the relative clause which indicates that the subject of the sentence (alle Attribute) is modified. 1