Chunk parsing has focused on the recognition of partial constituent structures at the level of individual chunks. Little attention has been paid to the question of how such partial analyses can be combined into larger structures for complete utterances. Such larger structures are not only desirable for a deeper syntactic analysis. They also constitute a necessary prerequisite for assigning function-argument structure. The present paper offers a similaritybased algorithm for assigning functional labels such as subject, object, head, complement, etc. to complete syntactic structures on the basis of prechunked input. The evaluation of the algorithm has concentrated on measuring the quality of functional labels. It was performed on a German and an English treebank using two different annotation schemes at the level of function-argument structure. The results of 89.73 % correct functional labels for German and 90.40 % for English validate the general approach. 1 With the exception of dependency-grammar-based parsers (Tapanainen and Järvinen, 1997; Bröker et al., 1994; Lesmo and Lombardo, 2000), where functional labels are treated as first-class citizens as relations between words, and recent work on a semi-automatic method for treebank construction (Brants et al., 1997), little has been reported on