Unbounded Dependency Constructions

Unbounded Dependency Constructions PDF Author: Rui P. Chaves
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191087920
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
This book is about one of the most intriguing features of human communication systems: the fact that words that go together in meaning can occur arbitrarily far away from each other. In the sentence This is technology that most people think about, but rarely consider the implications of, the word 'technology' is interpreted as if it were simultaneously next to the words 'about' and 'of'. This kind of long-distance dependency has been the subject of intense linguistic and psycholinguistic research for the last half century, and offers a unique insight into the nature of grammatical structures and their interaction with cognition. The constructions in which these unbounded dependencies arise are remarkably difficult to model and come with a rather puzzling array of constraints that have often defied characterization or proper explanation. This work provides a detailed survey of these constructions and the factors responsible for their creation and comprehension, describes new experimental evidence that sheds light on the nature of the phenomenon, and suggests new avenues for future research. The volume will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in the fields of morphosyntax, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science.

Unbounded Dependency Constructions

Unbounded Dependency Constructions PDF Author: Rui P. Chaves
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191087920
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is about one of the most intriguing features of human communication systems: the fact that words that go together in meaning can occur arbitrarily far away from each other. In the sentence This is technology that most people think about, but rarely consider the implications of, the word 'technology' is interpreted as if it were simultaneously next to the words 'about' and 'of'. This kind of long-distance dependency has been the subject of intense linguistic and psycholinguistic research for the last half century, and offers a unique insight into the nature of grammatical structures and their interaction with cognition. The constructions in which these unbounded dependencies arise are remarkably difficult to model and come with a rather puzzling array of constraints that have often defied characterization or proper explanation. This work provides a detailed survey of these constructions and the factors responsible for their creation and comprehension, describes new experimental evidence that sheds light on the nature of the phenomenon, and suggests new avenues for future research. The volume will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in the fields of morphosyntax, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science.

The Unity of Unbounded Dependency Constructions

The Unity of Unbounded Dependency Constructions PDF Author: Robert Levine
Publisher: Stanford Univ Center for the Study
ISBN: 9781575864662
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
How do languages transmit information about the properties of phrases over large structural distances? This is the difficult question raised by the phenomenon of extraction, and while extraction has driven the development of syntactic theory for decades, there is still no consensus on what form the connectivity mechanism should take. A number of recent theoretical approaches share the view that extraction is not a unitary phenomenon, but this monograph offers data that radically undercuts this view. The grammar of extraction connectivity, the authors conclude, is relatively simple, homogenous in construction type, and uniform in the position of the extractee.

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar PDF Author: Carl Pollard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226674476
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
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 modelling 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.

Experimental Syntax and Island Effects

Experimental Syntax and Island Effects PDF Author: Jon Sprouse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107652707
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
This volume brings together cutting-edge experimental research from leaders in the fields of linguistics and psycholinguistics to explore the nature of a phenomenon that has long been central to syntactic theory - 'island effects'. The chapters in this volume draw upon recent methodological advances in experimental methods in syntax, also known as 'experimental syntax', to investigate the underlying cognitive mechanisms that give rise to island effects. This volume presents a comprehensive empirical review of a contemporary debate in the field by including contributions from researchers representing a variety of points of view on the nature of island effects. This book is ideal for students and researchers interested in cutting-edge experimental techniques in linguistics, psycholinguistics and psychology.

Constructions at Work

Constructions at Work PDF Author: Adele Goldberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191533297
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This book investigates the nature of generalization in language and examines how language is known by adults and acquired by children. It looks at how and why constructions are learned, the relation between their forms and functions, and how cross-linguistic and language-internal generalizations about them can be explained. Constructions at Work is divided into three parts: in the first Professor Goldberg provides an overview of constructionist approaches, including the constructionist approach to argument structure, and argues for a usage-based model of grammar. In Part II she addresses issues concerning how generalizations are constrained and constructional generalizations are learned. In Part III the author shows that a combination of function and processing accounts for a wide range of language-internal and cross-linguistic generalizations. She then considers the degree to which the function of constructions explains their distribution and examines cross-linguistic tendencies in argument realization. She demonstrates that pragmatic and cognitive processes account for the data without appeal to stipulations that are language-specific. This book is an important contribution to the study of how language operates in the mind and in the world and how these operations relate. It is of central interest for scholars and graduate-level students in all branches of theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics. It will also appeal to cognitive scientists and philosophers concerned with language and its acquisition.

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar PDF Author: Stefan Müller
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961104824
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1718

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Book Description
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism).

Ten Lectures on Construction Grammar and Typology

Ten Lectures on Construction Grammar and Typology PDF Author: William Croft
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900436353X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In Ten Lectures on Construction Grammar and Typology, William Croft presents a unified theory of linguistic form and meaning that encompasses crosslinguistic diversity, verbalization and language change. Croft begins from construction grammar, a theory of syntax in which all syntactic structures are a pairing of form and meaning. Constructions are posited as basic; syntactic categories are defined by constructions. The internal structure of constructions directly link elements of constructions to the meanings they express, Constructions across languages can be situated in a space of syntactic variation. Grammar emerges from the verbalization of experience. Constructions occur in a probability distribution across the conceptual space of meanings. These probability distributions evolve, leading to grammatical change in language, modeled in an evolutionary framework.

Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar

Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar PDF Author: Gerald Gazdar
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674344556
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description


Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics

Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics PDF Author: Megan Crowhurst
Publisher: Center for the Study of Language (CSLI)
ISBN: 9780937073315
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description


The Unity of Unbounded Dependency Constructions

The Unity of Unbounded Dependency Constructions PDF Author: Robert Levine
Publisher: Center for the Study of Language and Information Publica Tion
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
How do human languages transmit complex information about the properties of phrases over arbitrarily large structural distances? This fundamental and difficult question is raised by the phenomenon of extraction. Extraction has driven the devlopment of syntactic theory over the past three and a half decades. However, there has been no consensus on what form the connectivity mechanism should take. A number of recent, mutually incompatible theoretical approaches share the general view that extraction is not a unitary phenomenon. This monograph argues that when a broader range of data is considered, the supporting arguments of this view are radically undercut. Levine and Hukari conclude that the grammar of extraction connectivity is relatively simple, homogeneous with respect to construction type and uniform with respect to the position of the extractee. Book jacket.