PDF #178 – Beyond the Constituent A Dependency Grammar Analysis of Chains
A Dependency Grammar Analysis – The paper introduces a unit of syntax beyond the constituent called the chain. A number of mechanisms are shown to be sensitive to chains, e.g. the formation of predicates and idioms, the ellipses of gapping, pseudogapping and VP-ellipsis, and the elided material of stripping and answer fragments.
The presentation is couched in a surface syntax, dependency-based framework, as opposed to a constituency-based one. While the chain can be defined in a manner consistent with constituency, doing so requires that one adopt some controversial assumptions about the nature of constituency structure. The potential of the chain concept is great; it is the tool necessary to address the manner in which semantic compositionality occurs in the syntax.
This paper has adopted from O’Grady (1998), and developed further, a novel
syntactic unit called the chain. The chain can be viewed as picking up where
the constituent leaves off insofar as certain mechanisms of syntax are sensitive to chains, not necessarily to constituents. The presentation above has considered the extent to which the chain is the essential unit of syntax behind predicate formation, including the predicates of idioms. In this regard, the chain can be viewed as the tool necessary for capturing the manner in which semantic units are realized in the syntax. Furthermore it has been demonstrated that the elided material of many ellipsis mechanisms – i.e. gapping, pseudogapping, stripping, and answer fragments – must correspond to chains.
The strength of dependency is its economy, dependency structures lacking the projections of constituency structures and hence containing generally half the number of nodes and edges. In this regard, compare the two formulations. The constituency-based definition must reference the projections of constituency structures in order to accomplish the same thing as the dependency-based definition, which has no need for such projections. The result is that the constituency-based definition is more cumbersome than the dependency-based version.
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