Alternative Conceptions of Phrase Structure

Download or read book Alternative Conceptions of Phrase Structure written by Mark R. Baltin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1989-07-10 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early years of generative grammar it was assumed that the appropriate mechanism for generating syntactic structures was a grammar of context-free rewriting rules. The twelve essays in this volume discuss recent challenges to this classical formulation of phrase structure and the alternative conceptions proposed to replace it. Each article approaches this issue from the perspective of a different linguistic framework, such as categorical grammar, government-binding theory, head-driven phrase structure grammar, and tree-adjoining grammar. By contributing to the understanding of the differing assumptions and research strategies of each theory, this volume serves as an important survey of current thinking on the frontier of theoretical and computation linguistics.