Syntax-Semantics interface

1965

One important aspect of teaching English syntax (to native and nonnative undergraduate students alike) involves the balance in the overall approach between facts and theory. We understand that one important goal of teaching English syntax to undergraduate students is to help students enhance their understanding of the structure of English in a systematic and scientific way. Basic knowledge of this kind is essential for students to move on the next stages, in which they will be able to perform linguistic analyses for simple as well as complex English phenomena. This new introductory textbook has been developed with this goal in mind. The book focuses primarily on the descriptive facts of English syntax, presented in a way that encourages students to develop keen insights into the English data. It then proceeds with the basic, theoretical concepts of generative grammar from which students can develop abilities to think, reason, and analyze English sentences from linguistic points of view.

Acta Linguistica Academica, 2020

Proceedings of the first conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics -, 1983

describes the structure and evaluation

Journal of Linguistics, 2010

This linguistic textbook by Peter Culicover provides a broad introductory overview of various topics in the study of syntax. Its major objectives are to show how natural language makes use of various syntactic and morphosyntactic devices, and to lay out the conceptual structures that correspond to particular aspects of linguistic form (xi). The title of the book is thoughtprovoking : rather than Introduction to syntax, Syntactic theory or the like, Culicover chose the title Natural language syntax, which can be interpreted twofold. First, it may be regarded as a direct response to recent research in syntax, especially the Minimalist program (Chomsky 1995), emphasizing that linguistic theory needs to place greater emphasis on accounting for actual language data rather than indulge in purely formalistic investigation. Another possible reading of the title is that the syntactic theory proposed in this book is natural, intuitive and simple, and that the title alludes to Culicover's previous book Simpler syntax (Culicover & Jackendoff 2005). In general, the discussions in this book are framed in theory-neutral terms, supplemented with comparisons between Culicover & Jackendoff's 'simpler syntax ' (SS) approach and so-called mainstream generative grammar (MGG). Chapter 1, 'Overview ', defines syntax as 'the system that governs the relationship between form and meaning in a language' (1) ; and states that the goal of linguistic theory is 'to understand what the properties of human languages are, and why they are that way ' (3). Culicover compares the SS and MGG approaches for the treatment of displacement. Instead of pursuing a derivational analysis, as in MGG, SS directly specifies 'correspondence rules ' between syntactic positions and meanings. Chapter 2, ' Syntactic categories ', provides a detailed description of various syntactic and morphosyntactic categories, and introduces the notational device of an attribute value matrix (also employed in Lexical Functional Grammar and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar), which displays the features and values of lexical items. To Culicover, a lexical item expresses the correspondences between mophosyntactic categories, semantic values and phonological representation, as exemplified in (1).

The Iterated Romance of Syntax, 2023

One of the greatest intellectual crimes to beset us in the 20th-century was the premature death of the formalist program. The millennia old dream of solving math was never realized as our efforts fell short of our ambition. David Hilbert, with all his grace, his effulgent brilliance, his professional magnanimity, and his unflinching dedication, was left with only disgruntled disappointment. The formalist program was a noble effort, held aloft by the unyielding conviction and charisma of the foremost mathematicians of the age. This forlorn vignette is rendered at least somewhat emotionally digestible by the developments that followed. The dream of syntax is all became partially realized by the contributions of Haskell Curry, Alonzo Church, Stephen Kleene, Moses Schönfinkel and others. With their syntactic approach to mathematics, we capture the compositional beauty of infinity in our humble symbol. And thus, we compile the syntactic face of God.

Inference: International Review of Science

In the first essay for a new series on landmark texts, Anna Maria Di Sciullo revisits Noam Chomsky’s classic Aspects on the Theory of Syntax. Published in 1965, Aspects was a revelation, presenting linguists with what, at once, became the Standard Theory. It promoted linguistics into a science, one that accepted the methods and the standards of the hard sciences themselves.

Proceedings of the 21st annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics -, 1983

A central goal of linguistic theory is to explain why natural languages are the way they are. It has often been supposed that com0utational considerations ought to play a role in this characterization, but rigorous arguments along these lines have been difficult to come by. In this paper we show how a key "axiom" of certain theories of grammar, Subjacency, can be explained by appealing to general restrictions on on-line parsing plus natural constraints on the rule-writing vocabulary of grammars. The explanation avoids the problems with Marcus' [1980] attempt to account for the same constraint. The argument is robust with respect to machine implementauon, and thus avoids the problems that often arise wilen making detailed claims about parsing efficiency. It has the added virtue of unifying in the functional domain of parsing certain grammatically disparate phenomena, as well as making a strong claim about the way in which the grammar is actually embedded into an on-line sentence processor.

In this programmatic paper, we articulate a minimalist conception of linguistic composition, syntactic and semantic, with the aim of identifying fundamental operations invoked by the human faculty of language (HFL). On this view, all complex expressions are formed via the operation COMBINE(A, B). But this operation is not primitive: COMBINE(A, B) = LABEL[CONCATENATE(A, B)]. We take labeling to be a computationally simple but perhaps distinctively human operation that converts a mere concatenation of expressions, like A^B, into a more complex unit like [ A A^B], with the subscript indicating a copy of the dominant constituent. We discuss several virtues of this spare conception of syntax. With regard to semantics, we take instances of COMBINE(A, B) to be instructions to build concepts. More specifically, we claim that concatenation is an instruction to conjoin monadic concepts, while labeling provides a vehicle for invoking thematic concepts, as indicated by the relevant labels.

2012

One of the crucial functions of any human language, such as English or Korean, is to convey various kinds of information from the everyday to the highly academic. Language provides a means for us to describe how to cook, how to remove cherry stains, how to understand English grammar, or how to provide a convincing argument. We commonly consider certain properties of language to be key essential features from which the basic study of linguistics starts.