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Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

This book presents the most complete exposition of the theory of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG), introduced in the authors’ Information-Based Syntax and Semantics. HPSG provides an integration of key ideas from the various disciplines of cognitive science, drawing on results from diverse approaches to syntactic theory, situation semantics, data type theory, and knowledge representation. The result is a conception of grammar as a set of declarative and order-independent constraints, a conception well suited to modelling human language processing.

This self-contained volume demonstrates the applicability of the HPSG approach to a wide range of empirical problems, including a number which have occupied center-stage within syntactic theory for well over twenty years: the control of "understood" subjects, long-distance dependencies conventionally treated in terms of wh-movement, and syntactic constraints on the relationship between various kinds of pronouns and their antecedents. The authors make clear how their approach compares with and improves upon approaches undertaken in other frameworks, including in particular the government-binding theory of Noam Chomsky.

454 pages | line art | 6 x 9 | © 1994

Studies in Contemporary Linguistics

Cognitive Science: Language

Language and Linguistics: Syntax and Semantics

Table of Contents

Preface
1 Introduction
2 Agreement
3 Complement Structures
4 Unbound Dependency Constructions
5 Relative Clauses
6 Binding Theory
7 Complement Control
8 Aspects of Interpretation

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