PDF #179 – Clitics and Constituents in Phrase Structure Grammar
In this study, I address a set of problems on the status of Phrase Structure Grammar and its importance to the syntax-morphology and the syntax-phonology interfaces. The point of departure of this study was the realization that the results of the classical constituency tests which have been proposed to motivate constituent structure in generative grammar, as inventoried for instance in a classical syntax textbook, pose a number of problems with respect to the classical assumptions about the constituent structure of English, and even more so, of French. In this paper the author makes an inventory of such tests and discuss their results – at a very naive level of linguistic sophistication – concentrating especially on the question of the internal syntax of the NP. This review lead to a number of somewhat surprising results. It first shows that the constituency tests can be largely divided into two groups, syntactically oriented criteria and phonologically oriented criteria. The it shows that the syntactically oriented tests largely undetermined constituent structure choices below the phrasal level, to an extent which is not usually taken into account. Furthermore, it shows that the results of the phonologically oriented tests often contradict the choices classically made for sub phrasal constituency in syntax.
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Phrase Structure Grammar
The term phrase structure grammar was originally introduced by Noam Chomsky as the term for grammar studied previously by Emil Post and Axel Thue (Post canonical systems). Some authors, however, reserve the term for more restricted grammars in the Chomsky hierarchy: context-sensitive grammars or context-free grammars. In a broader sense, phrase structure grammars are also known as constituency grammars. The defining trait of phrase structure grammars is thus their adherence to the constituency relation, as opposed to the dependency relation of dependency grammars.
What Is Phrase Structure in English Grammar?
Phrase structure grammar is a type of generative grammar in which constituent structures are represented by phrase structure rules or rewrite rules. Some of the different versions of phrase structure grammar (including head-driven phrase structure grammar) are considered in examples and observations below.
This book presents the most complete exposition of the theory of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG), introduced in the authors’ Information-Based Syntax and Semantics . HPSG provides an integration of key ideas from the various disciplines of cognitive science, drawing on results from diverse approaches to syntactic theory, situation semantics, data type theory, and knowledge representation. The result is a conception of grammar as a set of declarative and order-independent constraints, a conception well suited to modeling human language processing.
This self-contained volume demonstrates the applicability of the HPSG approach to a wide range of empirical problems, including a number which have occupied center-stage within syntactic theory for well over twenty years: the control of “understood” subjects, long-distance dependencies conventionally treated in terms of wh -movement, and syntactic constraints on the relationship between various kinds of pronouns and their antecedents. The authors make clear how their approach compares with and improves upon approaches undertaken in other frameworks, including in particular the government-binding theory of Noam Chomsky.
