Results by title

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.

Interrogative constructions are the linguistic forms by which questions are expressed. Their analysis is of great interest to linguists, as well as to computer scientists, human-computer interface designers, and philosophers. Interrogative constructions have played a central role in the development of modern syntactic theory. Nonetheless, to date most syntactic work has taken place quite separately from formal semantic and pragmatic work on interrogatives. Although there has by now been a significant amount of work on interrogatives across a variety of languages, there exist few syntactic and semantic treatments that provide a comprehensive account of a wide range of interrogative constructions and uses in a single language.

This book closes the gap in research on this subject. By developing the frameworks of Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Situation Semantics, the authors provide an account that rigorously integrates syntactic, semantic, and contextual dimensions of interrogatives. The challenge of providing exhaustive coverage of the interrogative constructions of English, including various constructions that occur solely in dialogue interaction, leads to new insights about a variety of contentious theoretical issues. These include matters of semantic ontology, the quantificational status of wh-phrases, the semantic effect of wh-fronting, the status of constructions in grammatical theory, the integration of illocutionary information in the grammar, and the nature of ellipsis resolution in dialogue. The account is stated with sufficient rigor to enable fairly direct computational implementation.

This book offers a long-awaited unified and precise treatise on construction-based grammar. The approach to grammar presented here is the union of Berkeley Construction Grammar, as represented by the early work of Charles J. Fillmore and Paul Kay, with construction HPSG as pioneered by Ivan Sag, Carl Pollard, and others. The presentation of this theory in a detailed chapter by Sag presents the full outlines of a new approach to grammar. It reflects the confluence of two separate, although converging, traditions, and constitutes a novel synthesis.

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