Connectors can have an optional floating-point cost markup, so that some are "cheaper" to use than others, thus giving preference to certain parses over others. That is, the total cost of parse is the sum of the individual costs of the connectors that were used; the cheapest parse indicates the most likely parse. This is used for parse-ranking multiple ambiguous parses. The fact that the costs are local to the connectors, and are not a global property of the algorithm makes them essentially Markovian in nature.