Ivan A. Sag

Hans Christian Boas

"This volume provides a general overview of Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG), the synthesis of Berkeley Construction Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar that emerged from a decade of interactions between Ivan Sag, Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay and Laura Michaelis. The papers collected here also demonstrate the analytic value of SBCG for a variety of linguistic problems -- some old chestnuts, others untouched by 'mainstream' theories."--P. [4] of cover.

Sign-based Construction Grammar

Thomas Wasow

Emily M. Bender

This second edition of Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction expands and improves upon a truly unique introductory syntax textbook. Like the first edition, its focus is on the development of precisely formulated grammars whose empirical predictions can be directly tested. There is also considerable emphasis on the prediction and evaluation of grammatical hypotheses, as well as on integrating syntactic hypotheses with matters of semantic analysis. The book covers the core areas of English syntax from the last quarter century, including complementation, control, "raising constructions," passives, the auxiliary system, and the analysis of long distance dependency constructions. Syntactic Theory's step-by-step introduction to a consistent grammar in these core areas is complemented by extensive problem sets drawing from a variety of languages. The book's theoretical perspective is presented in the context of current models of language processing, and the practical value of the constraint-based, lexicalist grammatical architecture proposed has already been demonstrated in computer language processing applications. This thoroughly reworked second edition includes revised and extended problem sets, updated analyses, additional examples, and more detailed exposition throughout. Praise for the first edition: "Syntactic Theory sets a new standard for introductory syntax volumes that all future books should be measured against."—Gert Webelhuth, Journal of Linguistics

A Formal Introduction

Syntactic Theory

Carl Pollard

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.

Ivan A. Sag

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