Tài liệu Constituent Structure - Part 3 doc

This page intentionally left blank Part 1 Preliminaries This page intentionally left blank 1 Introduction 1.1 What this book is about The study of phrase or constituent structure explores the combination of words into phrases and sentences. Constituent structure provides the roadmap that determines which words can be combined with which other words. This book is about the many, and varied, attempts to explain how word combination occurs. An old, but important, observation about sentences is that they are not merely a linear string of words. There appears, even at an intuitive level, to be some organization that links some words more closely together than others. Take, for example, the sentence in (1): (1) My cat eats at really fancy restaurants. In terms of interpretation, the relationship between really and fancy seems to be closer than that between eats and at. The word really tells us about how fancy the restaurants are, whereas the semantic relationship between eat and at seems to be mediated by the more distant words fancy and restaurants—this despite the fact that in terms of linear order the relationship between eat at and really fancy is identical—in each case the words are adjacent. In the structuralist tradition, whether instantiated in a formalist or functionalist framework, this kind of closeness is indicated by ‘‘phrase’’ (or ‘‘constituent’’) structure. The graphic representation of phrase structure has about as many variants as there are theories about syntax, but roughly converge on structures like those given in (2) as a tree (a) or a bracketed diagram (b): (a) My cat eats at really fancy restaurants (b) [[m y cat][eats [at [[reall y fanc y ] restaurants]]]] Although there is a great deal of controversy over even these simple diagrams (whether there is a verb phrase category, what the nature of each of the larger groups of words is, what labeling mechanisms are appropriate, etc.) all these structures capture the fact that there is some closer relationship between really and fancy than between eats and at. As Wrst observed by BloomWeld (1933), such semantically based grouping of words seems to correlate with the way these groups function w ith respect to syntactic processes. Compare, for example, the grouped constituent [eats at really fancy restau rants] to the non- constituent [eats at really]. The Wrst group can stand alone in answer to a question. The second cannot: (3) Q. What does your cat do when you’re on vacation? (a) Eat at really fancy restaurants. (b) *Eat at really. The Wrst group can be replaced by do so, the second cannot: (4) My cat eats at really fancy restaurants . . . (a) . . . and my goldWsh [does too]. (b) * . . . and my goldWsh [does too] fancy restaurants. Finally, the Wrst group can be dislocated in the sentence, but the second cannot: (5) (a) Eating at really fancy restaurants, that’s what my cat likes to do. (b) *Eating at really, that’s what my cat likes to do (fancy restaurants). These facts are fairly robust and require an account. 1.2 Organizational notes In this book, I survey the current thinking, both cross-linguistically and cross-theoretically, on the topic of constituent structure. In the next few chapters, I review some fundamentals of constituent structure. In Chapter 2, I present the basic empirical evidence for constitu ent structure (constituency tests), and I discuss the related notions of compositionality and ambiguity. We will see that simple theories of concatenation fail to capture the basic facts about phrase structure and that a hierarchical approach is necessary. However, we will also see that constituency tests do not always give uniform results about what the structure of a particular sentence is. Chapters 3 and 4 also cover some 4 preliminaries fundamentals and describes in simple terms a uniform vocabulary for describing phrase structure. Chapter 3 focuses on the primitive rela- tions of precedence and dominance. Chapter 4 looks at the higher- order relations of c-command and government, which are largely restricted to theories operating in the Principles and Parameters (P&P) framework. In order to facilitate discussion of complex questions and controver- sies, the second section of the book gives an explicit and detailed history and description of two popular and widely adopted approaches to phrase structure. Chapter 5 addresses the basics of phrase structure grammars (PSGs). Chapter 6 looks at the wide variety of extensions to PSGs that have been proposed, including transformations, metarules, functional equations, feature structures, meaning postulates, and lexical rules. Finally, Chapter 7 addresses the origins and forms of, and the motivations for one particular extension to, PSGs, namely, X-bar theory. The last section of the book examines critical controversies in treat- ments of constituent structure. Two of these chapters (8 and 11) focus almost exclusively on recent proposals in the Minimalist Program variety of P&P. Chapter 8 traces the development of Bare Phrase Structure and related notions including Antisymmetry and derived X-bar theory. Chapter 12 addresses questions about the categorial and structural content of constituent systems. It discusses a tripartite view of the clause, with an emphasis on an approach that uses functional categories. There is also a fair amount of discussion as to whether there is a verb phrase (VP) category or not. Chapters 9 and 10, by contrast, emphasize non-Minimalist controversies. Chapter 9 looks at alterna- tives to constituency based systems, looking at systems based in seman- tic relations, dependencies, Categorial Grammars, and constructional schemata. Chapter 10 questions some of the basic assumptions of Chapter 2, and considers approaches that allow the crossing of lines in trees. It also looks at cases where a single node in the tree is dominated by multiple nodes (multidomination), approaches where there is a single constituent system, but it branches multidimensionally, and approaches with multiple planes of constituent structure. 1.3 Apples, oranges, and pears Most books on syntax, textbooks aside of course, are designed to promote a single theory or convince the reader about an innovation of recent syntactic theorizing. Readers picking up this book and introduction 5 looking for a well-argued coherent proposal about phrase structure are likely to be disappointed. This is due to the nature of the series this book appears in. The surveys in this series are not supposed to isolate a single viewpoint, but instead should provide a survey of the thinking on a particular topic. In this case, this means sur veying a wide variety of theoretical approaches with a wide variety of underlying assump- tions. For the reader this means that sometimes the discussion will be dizzying in the way I shift from one set of assumptions to another, sometimes with little argument. Except where I feel strongly about a topic, I try to avoid presenting too much evaluation and concentrate on presenting the ideas in what I hope is a coherent way. Throughout the book, I will be surveying and discussing many concepts that are controversial. I will do my best to provide an even- handed presentation of alternative points of view. In some cases, I will just describe all the sides of a question and leave it open to the reader to judge the question on their own. In others, my own biases1 will emerge, and I will argue for one particular view or another. No doubt propon- ents of other views will be frustrated with my presentation both when I present their ideas and when I leave them out. Even if I do not discuss alternatives in detail, I have tried to provide suYcient citations so that the interested reader will be able to follow up. I know this is frustrating, but the constraint that I not write a multi-volume encyclopedia on constituent structure requires that I limit the discussion in some ways. Comparing theories and frameworks of syntax is a dangerous game. On one hand, one might be comparing theoretical tools that appear the same but are diVerent on some deep ontological way. On the other hand, one can easily miss similarities between approaches when they are couched in distinct formalisms. I am well aware that my discussion in this book occasionally suV ers from both these Xaws. I hope the reader will be patient with me when this happens. The theories I address at various levels of detail here include, obvi- ously, the main line of Chomskyan theorizing, including Transform- ational Grammar (TG), The Standard Theory, The Extended Standard Theory (EST), and the class of theoretical proposals known as Principles and Parameters (P&P), which includes Government and Binding The- ory (GB) and the Minimalist Program (MP). Five other generative 1 I am a generative (minimalist) syntactician, so my biases tend in the direction of that general theoretical approach. This is reXected in the heavy emphasis in this book on generative grammar. Even within minimalism, I have my own particular take on many issues. 6 preliminaries theories are considered in some detail: Relational Grammar (RG), Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), Tree-Adjoining Grammar (TAG), Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The structuralist–functionalist theory of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) and the new Simpler Syntax model also receive some attention. On a much more limited scale, I also brieXy discuss relevant parts of many theories that do not have a phrase structure component per se, such as Dep endency Grammar (including Word Grammar), Categorial Grammar, Func- tional Grammar, Cognitive Grammar, and Construction Grammar. The discussion of these latter approaches is largely limited to Chapter 9. 1.4 Who I assume you are Since this book covers a wide variety of topics in a wide variety of frameworks, I think it is worth spending a few words about what I have assumed you know as I write this book. In some parts of this book (e.g. Chs. 2 and 3), I star t at very Wrst principles and work up to a higher level of understanding. I do this to ensure that the discussion is thorough and grounded. Despite this, this book is not meant to be an introduction to the material. I am assuming that readers have at least a basic course in general syntactic analysis (see for example my 2006c textbook), and ideally have a more detailed background in some major version of generative grammar. I hope that the presentation here will give both the beginning syntactician and the experienced old hand pause to think about the nature of the relationship between words and the representation of these relationships in terms of constituent structure. introduction 7 2 Constituent Structure 2.1 Constituent structure as simple concatenation Let us start our c onsideration of c onstituent structure b y considering a few simple h ypotheses about the nature o f our grammars ’ w ord-c ombination mechanisms. Outside of linguistics, there is a well-established tradition gov erning combinatorics: mathematics. So consider preliminarily the possibility that some already well-motivated mechanisms from arithmetic or other mathematical disciplines might be carried ov er to the domain of sentence structur e. Perhaps the simplest theory of phrase structure would be one of linear c oncatenation. On such an appr oach, phrase structure simply c orr esponds to the order of speech from the beginning of the utterance to the end (or from left to right on the printed page.) Consider the follo wing sentence: (1) Nemo ate Dory’s seaweed. In our concatenation approach, the structure would be that in (2): (2) Nemo þ ate þ Dory’s þ seaweed. Let us assume, not uncontroversially, that we as linguists have an intuitive notion of semantic relatedness between words reXecting which words ‘‘modify’’ other words. For example, we can intuit that Dory’s is more clo sely related to seaweed (it tells us whose seaweed is being eaten, thus modiWes seaweed) than it is to either Nemo or ate. Ultimately, of course, we will want something more scientiWc than this heuristic (and will return to empirical tests for structure later in this chapter), but for the moment this intuitive notion of ‘‘closeness’’ of words will suYce to make some simple points about our straw-man proposal of simple concatenation. It is not hard to see how simple concatenation fails to capture a native speaker’s intuitions about this sentence. First, let us consider what might be meant by the þ signs in (2); let us take them literally, and assume that they are equivalent to the algebraic addition function. We might call this the concatenation-as-addition hypothesis. Addition is commutative; that is, 2 þ 4 ¼ 4 þ 2. But if we compute the meaning of the structure in (2) using addition, we might predict that the sentence means the same thing as any of the sentences in (3): (3) (a) Dory’s seaweed ate Nemo. (b) Dory ate Nemo’s seaweed. (c) Seaweed ate Dory’s Nemo. etc. Clearly this is not true: (2) mea ns something quite distinct from any of the sentences in (3). One might reasonably object that this is because the important relation here is not one of addition per se, but rather the relationship med iated by the meanings of the words. That is, you know that the word ate expresses a relation between two nouns and that relationship is not symmetric or commutative: ate requires that the Wrst noun does the eating, and the second one is the eatee; the lexical semantic relationships between the words limit the combinatorics, but the mechanism of combination itself is simple addition. While seman- tic relationships do indeed play an important role in governing com- binatorics,1 this revised hypothesis misses the point about simple addition. By claiming that ate has some privileged status in the sen- tence, we are essentially abandoning the idea that the words combine by simple concatenation in a manner similar to addition (it would be like claiming that the number 4 has some special property that governs which other numbers it can be combined with and in what order). In the end, this idea that certain words have a privileged semantic status—i.e. headedness—is ultimate ly adopted by almost every syntacti- cian today; we will discuss this in detail in Chapters 7 and 9. However, enriching the system with semantic notions does not allow us to maintain the concatenation-as-addition hypothesis as the simplest possible approach to word combination: it becomes an entirely diVer- ent kind of theory. Consider another possibility, which is only one step removed from our simple concatenation-as-addition hypothesis. Perhaps, unlike sim- ple addition, the order in which the structure is built is important. That is, we have something like addition, but that is not commutative. 1 See Farrell (2005) and Ch. 9 for discussions of the semantic or grammatical relations among words. constituent structure 9 . cross-linguistically and cross-theoretically, on the topic of constituent structure. In the next few chapters, I review some fundamentals of constituent structure. In. representation of these relationships in terms of constituent structure. introduction 7 2 Constituent Structure 2.1 Constituent structure as simple concatenation Let