Adjectives as roots of nominal groups: the big mess construction in dependency grammar

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Osborne
Keyword(s):  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Current Approach ◽  
Normal Position ◽  
Phrase Structure Grammar ◽  
Dependency Grammar ◽  
Attributive Adjective ◽  
Nominal Groups

Abstract The so-called ‘Big Mess Construction’ (BMC) frustrates standard assumptions about the structure of nominal groups. The normal position of an attributive adjective is after the determiner and before the noun, but in the BMC, the adjective precedes the determiner, e.g. that strange a sound, so big a scandal, too lame an excuse. Previous accounts of the BMC are couched in ‘Phrase Structure Grammar’ (PSG) and view the noun or the determiner (or the preposition of) as the root/head of the BMC phrase. In contrast, the current approach, which is couched in a ‘Dependency Grammar’ (DG) model, argues that the adjective is in fact the root/head of the phrase. A number of insights point to the adjective as the root/head, the most important of which is the optional appearance of the preposition of, e.g. that strange of a sound, so big of a scandal, too lame of an excuse.

Adjectives as roots of nominal groups: the big mess construction in dependency grammar

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 231-263
Author(s):  
Timothy Osborne
Keyword(s):  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Current Approach ◽  
Normal Position ◽  
Phrase Structure Grammar ◽  
Dependency Grammar ◽  
Attributive Adjective ◽  
Nominal Groups

Abstract The so-called ‘Big Mess Construction’ (BMC) frustrates standard assumptions about the structure of nominal groups. The normal position of an attributive adjective is after the determiner and before the noun, but in the BMC, the adjective precedes the determiner, e.g. that strange a sound, so big a scandal, too lame an excuse. Previous accounts of the BMC are couched in ‘Phrase Structure Grammar’ (PSG) and view the noun or the determiner (or the preposition of) as the root/head of the BMC phrase. In contrast, the current approach, which is couched in a ‘Dependency Grammar’ (DG) model, argues that the adjective is in fact the root/head of the phrase. A number of insights point to the adjective as the root/head, the most important of which is the optional appearance of the preposition of, e.g. that strange of a sound, so big of a scandal, too lame of an excuse.

NPs, not DPs: The NP vs. DP debate in the context of dependency grammar

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Osborne
Keyword(s):  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Frequent Occurrence ◽  
Sentence Structure ◽  
Phrase Structure Grammar ◽  
Dependency Grammar ◽  
Nominal Groups

AbstractThis paper considers the NP vs. DP debate from the perspective of dependency grammar (DG). The message is delivered that given DG assumptions about sentence structure, the traditional NP-analysis of nominal groups is preferable over the DP-analysis. The debate is also considered from the perspective of phrase structure grammar (PSG). While many of the issues discussed here do not directly support NP over DP given PSG assumptions, some do. More importantly, one has to accept the widespread presence of null determiner heads for the DP analysis to be plausible on PSG assumptions. The argument developed at length here is that the traditional NP-analysis of nominal groups is both more accurate and simpler than the DP-analysis, in part because it does not rely on the frequent occurrence of null determiners.

Zwicky on heads

1987 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Present Status ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
The Other ◽  
Phrase Structure Grammar ◽  
Dependency Grammar ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Interesting Development

An interesting development in the last decade or so has been the increasing use that theoretical linguists have made of the notion ‘head’ – or rather, in order not to beg the question, of notions to which they have given the name ‘head’. The term has been around for a long time in linguistics, of course – for example Bloomfield uses it in relation to endocentric constructions (1933: 195), where the head is the daughter constituent which has the same distribution as the mother. Before that, Sweet had used ‘head-word’ to refer to any word to which another is subordinate (1891: 16, quoted in Matthews, 1981: 165). However, theoretical linguists made very little use of the term, or of the constellation of associated concepts, until quite recently. Its present status is due largely to work on X-bar syntax dating from Chomsky (1970), and especially to its recent manifestation in Generalised Phrase Structure Grammar (Gazdar & Pullum, 1981; Gazdar et al., 1985)–and even more so in the ‘head-driven’ variant of this (Pollard, 1985). But the improved status of ‘head’ is also due to some extent to the renewed interest in dependency grammar (Anderson, 1971, 1977; Matthews, 1981; Atkinson, et al, 1982; Hudson, 1984; Nichols, 1986). All these treatments agree not only in using the term ‘head’, but also in using it to refer to the element in some construction to which all the other parts of that construction are (in some sense) subordinate.

scholarly journals Evaluating theories: Counting nodes and the question of constituency

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Müller
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Phrase Structure Grammar ◽  
Dependency Grammar ◽  
General Validity ◽  
Theory Evaluation

This paper is a reply to Timothy Osborne’s paper Tests for constituents: What they really reveal about the nature of syntactic structure that appeared 2018 in Language under Discussion. This paper discusses how constituent tests work and why it is no problem if they are not applicable. It is argued that Osborne’s claims regarding simplicity of Dependency Grammar (DG) in comparison to Phrase Structure Grammar (PSG) are unwarranted and that DG models that include semantics make use of auxiliary structure that is equivalent to the nodes assumed in PSG. A final section of the paper discusses the general validity of counting nodes for theory evaluation and the assumption of empty elements vs. specialized phrasal rules.

What participles are a mixture of

Linguistics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Van Eynde
Keyword(s):  
Phrase Structure ◽  
The Other ◽  
Second Step ◽  
Phrase Structure Grammar ◽  
Mixed Nature

Abstract It is commonly assumed that participles show a mixture of verbal and adjectival properties, but the issue of how this mixed nature can best be captured is anything but settled. Analyses range from the purely adjectival to the purely verbal with various shades in between. This lack of consensus is at least partly due to the fact that participles are used in a variety of ways and that an analysis which fits one of them is not necessarily equally plausible for the other. In an effort to overcome the resulting fragmentation this paper proposes an analysis that covers all uses of the participles, from the adnominal over the predicative to the free adjunct uses, including also the nominalized ones. To keep it feasible we focus on one language, namely Dutch. With the help of a treebank we first identify the uses of the Dutch participles and describe their properties in informal terms. In a second step we provide an analysis in terms of the notation of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. A key property of the analysis is the differentiation between core uses and grammaticalized uses. The treatment of the latter is influenced by insights from Grammaticalization Theory.

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