We have argued in this paper that sophisticated grammatical analysis in combination with a robust parser can be applied successfully as an ingredient of a spoken dialogue system. Grammatical analysis is thereby shown to be a viable alternative to techniques such as concept spotting. We showed that for a state-of-the-art application (public transport information system) grammatical analysis can be applied efficiently and effectively. It is expected that the use of sophisticated grammatical analysis allows for easier construction of linguistically more complex spoken dialogue systems.