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- Title
Chopping down the syntax tree.
- Authors
van Trijp, Remi
- Abstract
Word order, argument structure and unbounded dependencies are among the most important topics in linguistics because they touch upon the core of the syntax- semantics interface. One question is whether "marked" word order patterns, such as The man I talked to vs. I talked to the man, require special treatment by the grammar or not. Mainstream linguistics answers this question affirmatively: in the marked order, some mechanism is necessary for "extracting" the man from its original argument position, and a special placement rule (e.g. topicalization)is needed for putting the constituent in clause-preceding position. This paper takes an opposing view and argues that such formal complexity is only required for analyses that are based on syntactic trees. A tree is a rigid data structure that only allows information to be shared between local nodes, hence it is inadequate for non-local dependencies and can only allow restricted word order variations. A construction, on the other hand, offers a more powerful representation device that allows word order variations - even unbounded dependencies - to be analyzed as the side-effect of how language users combine the same rules in different ways in order to satisfy their communicative needs. This claim is substantiated through a computational implementation of English argument structure constructions in Fluid Construction Grammar that can handle both comprehension and formulation.
- Subjects
SYNTAX (Grammar); WORD order (Grammar); LINGUISTICS; VERB phrases; PHRASE structure grammar
- Publication
Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 2016, Vol 30, Issue 1, p15
- ISSN
0774-5141
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1075/bjl.30.02van