What is the most descriptively and explanatorily adequate format for syntactic structures and how are they constrained? Different theories of syntax have provided various answers: sets, feature structures, tree diagrams… Building on formal and empirical insights from a wide variety of approaches spanning more than 70 years (including Transformational Grammar, Relational Grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar, and Tree Adjoining Grammar), this monograph develops a new, mathematically grounded, framework in which objects known as graphs, and the constraints that follow from them, are argued to provide the best characterisation of the system of expressions and relations that make up natural language grammars. This new approach is motivated and exemplified via detailed and formally explicit analyses of major syntactic phenomena in English and Spanish.
Author(s): Diego Gabriel Krivochen
Edition: 1
Publisher: Brill
Year: 2023
Language: English
City: Leiden
Tags: syntax
Contents
Editorial Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Figures
Abbreviations
Chapter 1. Introduction: Setting the Scene
1.1. Methodological and Historical Context
1.2. Transformations and the Preservation of Relations
1.3. Declarative vs. Procedural Syntax
1.4. On Graphs and Phrase Markers: First- and Second-Order Conditions on Structural Representations
1.5. Structural Uniformity (and Two Ways to Fix It)
1.6. You Only Have One Mother
Chapter 2. Fundamentals of Graph-Theoretic Syntax
2.1. Defining (L-)Graphs
2.2. Syntactic Composition and Semantic Interpretation
2.3. Adjacency Matrices and Arcs: More on Allowed Relations
Chapter 3. A Proof of Concept: Discontinuous Constituents
Chapter 4. Some Inter-Theoretical Comparisons
4.1. Multiple-Gap Relative Constructions
4.2. Dependencies and Rootedness
4.3. Crossing Dependencies
Chapter 5. Ordered Relations and Grammatical Functions
5.1. A Categorial Excursus on Unaccusatives and Expletives
Chapter 6. Towards an Analysis of English Predicate Complement Constructions
6.1. Raising to Subject
6.2. Raising to Object
6.3. Object-Controlled Equi
6.4. Subject-Controlled Equi
6.5. A Note on Raising and Polarity: ‘Opacity’ Revisited
Chapter 7. More on Cross-Arboreal Relations: Parentheticals and Clitic Climbing in Spanish
7.1. Discontinuity and Clitic Climbing in Spanish Auxiliary Chains
Chapter 8. On Unexpected Binding Effects: a Graph-Theoretic Approach to Binding Theory
8.1. Grafts and Graphs
Chapter 9. Complementation within the NP
Chapter 10. Wh-Interrogatives: Aspects of Syntax and Semantics
10.1. Simple Wh-Questions
Chapter 11. MIGs and Prizes
Chapter 12. The Structural Heterogeneity of Coordinations
Chapter 13. A Small Collection of Transformations
13.1. Passivisation
13.2. Dative Shift
13.3. Transformations vs. Alternations
Chapter 14. Some Open Problems and Questions
14.1. A Note on Leftward and Rightward Extractions
14.2. Deletion without Deletion
14.3. Long Distance Dependencies and Resumptive Pronouns
14.4. Identity Issues in Local Reflexive Anaphora
14.5. Ghost in the Graph
14.6. A Derivational Alternative?
14.7. Future Prospects
Chapter 15. Concluding Remarks
Appendix. Some Notes on (Other) Graph-Based Approaches
References
General Index
