Sometreebanks, such as German TIGER/NeGra, represent discontinuous elements directly, i.e. trees contain crossing edges, but the context-free grammars that are extracted from them, fail to make any use of this information. In this paper, we present amethod for extracting mildly context-sensitive grammars, i.e. simple range concatenation grammars (RCGs), from such treebanks. A measure for the degree of a treebank’s mild contextsensitivity is presented and compared to similar measures used in non-projective dependency parsing. Our work is also compared to discontinuous phrase structure grammar (DPSG).