On directionality of phrase structure building (original) (raw)
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Due to the programmatic nature of Minimalism, there are of course many directions that it can take. This paper demonstrates that one trend in Minimalism is steering toward Dependency Grammar (DG): bare phrase structure, label-less trees, and specifier-less syntax are all aspects/developments of/within Minimalism that are steering toward a dependency-based (as opposed to a constituency-based) understanding of syntax and grammar. With this trend in mind, a version of Merge is introduced that completes the development. This version generates dependency-based structures in a strictly left-to-right manner, i.e. in the manner that all natural language is spoken and processed. The particular innovation that makes this concept of Merge possible is the catena. The catena is a novel unit of syntactic analysis that is unique to dependency-based structures. A number of empirical considerations support catena-based left-toright Merge, e.g. garden path sentences, restrictions on center embeddings, aspects of coordinate structures, subject-auxiliary inversion, the distribution of pronouns, etc.
Phases and Complexity in Phrase Structure Building
The 15th Meeting of Computational Linguistics in the …, 2004
The Minimalist Program sketches a model that aims to be empirically adequate and theoretically motivated but that does not fit in any clear way with specific performance algorithms such as parsing or generation even though much emphasis is put on "interface properties". In this paper I propose that a Minimalist Grammar formalization (an extension of Stabler's 1997 proposal) can be used both in parsing and in generation if we re-orient the directionality of the Structure Building Operations (merge and move) and if we formalize the notion of phase (Chomsky 1999). This will help us to define generalized algorithms, suitable both for parsing and for generation, which are computationally tractable in dealing with ambiguities and long distance dependencies resolution.
An inquiry into minimalist phrase structure
1999
This thesis takes as its starting point the proposal in Kayne (1994) that all syntactic structures are underlyingly spec-head-complement, and that they are right-branching. I will investigate this proposal taking data from English degree constructions, namely result clauses and comparatives. A comparison will be made between these constructions and English VPs, on which the majority of the phrase structure debate in the literature has been based. The evidence for left-branching and for right-branching in VPs will be considered, and similar evidence sought for degree constructions. We will see that VPs have a mostly right-branching structure, although left-branching structures are required in restricted circumstances. Also reason and manner adjuncts are argued to be right-adjoined to the VP node, a conclusion that is reinforced by considering the constituency of VP adjuncts and some PP sequences noted by Jackendoff (1973). In degree constructions too, we argue that both left-branching and right-branching structures are necessary. My conclusion will be that Kayne's proposal is too strong, even though it is ideal from the perspective of a minimalist approach to syntax.
Minimal C-structure: Rethinking Projection in Phrase Structure
Proceedings of the LFG’17 Conference, 2017
This paper addresses the formal properties of constituent structure (c-structure). We demonstrate inadequacies in the formalization of traditional X-bar theory by Bresnan (2001) and Bresnan et al. (2016), and in the alternative proposal of Marcotte (2014). We propose " minimal c-structure " as a new approach to phrase structure within Lexical-Functional Grammar, which almost entirely eliminates non-branching nodes, and neatly captures the distinction between projecting and non-projecting words. Our proposal is fully formalized , and has been successfully tested by an XLE implementation.
Bare Phrase Structure and Specifier-less Syntax
Biolinguistics
It is pointed out that “specifiers” render the algorithm of projection overly complex. This consideration lends support to Starke’s (2004) reanalysis of specifiers as phrasal heads that project their own phrases — which makes phrase structure a simple sequence of head-complement relations. It is further pointed out that if head-complement relations are represented using dominance in place of sisterhood, to reflect the essentially asymmetrical nature of Merge (Chomsky 2000), a non-branching (partially linear) phrase structure tree is obtained that very naturally eliminates labels and projections. A simple Spell-Out rule then provides a linear ordering of the terminal elements. The linear tree preserves all the major results of antisymmetry.
Adjuncts and the theory of phrase structure
Manuscript, University of Florence, 1995
la thia article I ah~ll ftrat review the ava1lable ev1dence concerning the poa1t1on of adverbial&. I shall conclude that the claaa1cal X-bar thuoret1cal approach to co~plex adverbials. in term• o1 r1ght adJunction, accounts adequately for the data. On the contrary. Kayne's (1994) and Shomsky's (1995) constraints aga1nst right adjunction lead to serious problems.