Why do we need another book about unbounded dependencies? A review article on Chaves & Putnam’s Unbounded Dependency Constructions

Unbounded dependencies (UDs), in wh-interrogatives, relative clauses and other constructions, have been a major focus of syntactic research for more than half a century. The most widely assumed approach analyzes them in terms of movement and views island phenomena as largely a matter of syntax. Both these positions are problematic. Moreover, they stem from assumptions that have been at the heart of syntactic theorizing for many decades. Chaves and Putnam present evidence that both the dominant approach to UDs and the general approach to syntax from which it derives are flawed. They argue for a non-movement approach to UDs and a largely non-syntactic approach to island phenomena, and for an approach to syntax which has the relation between linguistic knowledge and language use and the complexity of acceptability judgements as central concerns. Their book is an important one that could have a major impact both on research on UDs and on syntactic research more generally.

Eighteen-month-old infants represent nonlocal syntactic dependencies

The human ability to produce and understand an indefinite number of sentences is driven by syntax, a cognitive system that can combine a finite number of primitive linguistic elements to build arbitrarily complex expressions. The expressive power of syntax comes in part from its ability to encode potentially unbounded dependencies over abstract structural configurations. How does such a system develop in human minds? We show that 18-mo-old infants are capable of representing abstract nonlocal dependencies, suggesting that a core property of syntax emerges early in development. Our test case is English wh-questions, in which a fronted wh-phrase can act as the argument of a verb at a distance (e.g., What did the chef burn?). Whereas prior work has focused on infants’ interpretations of these questions, we introduce a test to probe their underlying syntactic representations, independent of meaning. We ask when infants know that an object wh-phrase and a local object of a verb cannot co-occur because they both express the same argument relation (e.g., *What did the chef burn the pizza). We find that 1) 18 mo olds demonstrate awareness of this complementary distribution pattern and thus represent the nonlocal grammatical dependency between the wh-phrase and the verb, but 2) younger infants do not. These results suggest that the second year of life is a period of active syntactic development, during which the computational capacities for representing nonlocal syntactic dependencies become evident.

Unbounded Dependency Constructions

This book is about one of the most intriguing features of human communication systems: the fact that words which go together in meaning can occur arbitrarily far away from each other. The kind of long-distance dependency that this volume is concerned with has been the subject of intense linguistic and psycholinguistic research for the last half century, and offers a unique insight into the nature of grammatical structures and their interaction with cognition. The constructions in which these unbounded dependencies arise are difficult to model and come with a rather puzzling array of constraints which have defied characterization and a proper explanation. For example, there are filler-gap dependencies in which the filler phrase is a plural phrase formed from the combination of each of the extracted phrases, and there are filler-gap constructions in which the filler phrase itself contains a gap that is linked to another filler phrase. What is more, different types of filler-gap dependency can compound, in the same sentence. Conversely, not all kinds of filler-gap dependencies are equally licit; some are robustly ruled out by the grammar whereas others have a less clear status because they have graded acceptability and can be made to improve in ideal contexts and conditions. This work provides a detailed survey of these linguistic phenomena and extant accounts, while also incorporating new experimental evidence to shed light on why the phenomena are the way they are and what important research on this topic lies ahead.

Successive Cyclicity and the Syntax of Long-Distance Dependencies

Every major theoretical approach to syntactic structure incorporates a mechanism for generating unbounded dependencies. In this article, I distinguish between some of the most commonly entertained mechanisms by looking in detail at one of the most fundamental discoveries about long-distance dependencies, the fact that they are successive cyclic. Most of the mechanisms posited in order to generate long-distance dependencies capture this property, but make different predictions about what reflexes of successive cyclicity should be attested across languages. In particular, theories of long-distance dependencies can be distinguished according to whether they propose intermediate occurrences of the moving phrases (movement theories) or whether intermediate heads carry features relevant to displacement (featural theories). I show that a full consideration of the typology of successive cyclicity provides clear evidence that both components are part of the syntax of long-distance dependencies. In addition, reflexes of successive cyclicity are equally distributed across the CP and vP edge, suggesting that these are parallel domains.

What grammars are, or ought to be

Progress toward distinguishing clearly between generative and model-theoretic syntactic frameworks has not been smooth or swift, and the obfuscatory term ˋconstraint-based' has not helped. This paper reviews some elementary subregular formal language theory relevant to comparing description languages for model-theoretic grammars, generalizes the results to trees, and points out that HPSG linguists have maintained an unacknowledged and perhaps unintended allegiance to the idea of strictly local description: unbounded dependencies, in particular, are still being conceptualized in terms of plugging together local tree parts annotated with the SLASH feature. Adopting a description language with quantifiers holds out the prospect of eliminating the need for the SLASH feature. We need to ask whether that would be a good idea. Binding domain phenomena might tell us. More work of both descriptive and mathematical sorts is needed before the answer is clear.

Explanations and ˋEngineering Solutions'? Aspects of the relation between Minimalism and HPSG

It is not simple to compare Minimalism and HPSG, but it is possible to identify a variety of differences, some not so important but others of considerable importance. Two of the latter are: (1) the fact that Minimalism is a very lexically-based approach whereas HPSG is more syntactically-based, and (2) the fact that Minimalism uses Internal Merge in the analysis of unbounded dependencies whereas HPSG employs the SLASH feature. In both cases the HPSG approach seems to offer a better account of the facts. Thus, in two important respects it seems preferable to Minimalism.

From Natural Language to RDF Graphs with Pregroups

We define an algorithm translating natural language sentences to the formal syntax of RDF, an existential conjunctive logic widely used on the Semantic Web. Our translationis based on pregroup grammars, an efficient type-logical grammatical framework with atransparent syntax-semantics interface. We introduce a restricted notion of side effects inthe semantic category of finitely generated free semimodules over {0,1} to that end.The translation gives an intensional counterpart to previous extensional models.We establish a one-to-one correspondence between extensional models and RDF models such that satisfaction is preserved. Our translation encompasses the expressivity of the target language and supports complex linguistic constructions like relative clauses and unbounded dependencies.

Chopping down the syntax tree

Word order, argument structure and unbounded dependencies are among the most important topics in linguistics because they touch upon the core of the syntax-semantics interface. One question is whether “marked” word order patterns, such as The man I talked to vs. I talked to the man, require special treatment by the grammar or not. Mainstream linguistics answers this question affirmatively: in the marked order, some mechanism is necessary for “extracting” the man from its original argument position, and a special placement rule (e.g. topicalization) is needed for putting the constituent in clause-preceding position. This paper takes an opposing view and argues that such formal complexity is only required for analyses that are based on syntactic trees. A tree is a rigid data structure that only allows information to be shared between local nodes, hence it is inadequate for non-local dependencies and can only allow restricted word order variations. A construction, on the other hand, offers a more powerful representation device that allows word order variations – even unbounded dependencies – to be analyzed as the side-effect of how language users combine the same rules in different ways in order to satisfy their communicative needs. This claim is substantiated through a computational implementation of English argument structure constructions in Fluid Construction Grammar that can handle both comprehension and formulation.