Skip to main content

Distributed for Center for the Study of Language and Information

A Descriptive Approach to Language-Theoretic Complexity

Early formal specifications of natural language syntax were quite closely connected to the notion of abstract machines for computing them. This provided a very natural means of gauging the relative difficulty of processing various constructions, as well as offering some insight into the abstract properties of the human language faculty. More recently, this approach has been superseded by one in which languages are specified in terms of systems of constraints on the structure of their sentences. This has made complexity results difficult to obtain. This book introduces a way of obtaining such results. It presents a natural and quite general means of expressing constraints on the structure of trees and shows that the languages that can be specified by systems of such constraints are exactly those computable by a particular standard class of abstract machines. Thus the difficulty of processing a construction can be reduced to the difficulty of expressing the constraints that specify it. The technique is demonstrated by applying it to a fairly complete treatment of English within the framework of Government and Binding theory, with the result of showing that its complexity is much less than has heretofore been assumed.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements

1    Language-Theoretic Complexity in Generative Grammar 
Part I   The Descriptive Complexity of Strongly Context-Free Languages
2    Introduction to Part I
3    Trees as Elementary Structures
4      L²K,P   and SnS 
5    Definability and Non-Definability in K,P
6    Conclusion of Part I
Part II   The Generative Capacity of GB Theories 
7    Introduction to Part II
8    The Fundamental Structures of GB Theories
9    GB and Non-definability in L²K,P
10   Formalizing X-Bar Theory
11   The Lexicon, Theta Theory and Case Theory
12   Binding and Control
13   Chains
14   Reconstruction
15   Limitations of the Interpretation
16   Conclusion of Part II

Index of Symbols
Index of Definitions
Bibliography
Subject Index
Name Index  

Be the first to know

Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists!

Sign up here for updates about the Press