Abstract
The purpose of a grammatical theory is to specify the mechanisms and principles that can characterize the relations of acceptable sentences in particular languages to the meanings that they express. It is sometimes proposed that the simplest and most explanatory way of arranging the formal mechanisms of grammatical description is to allow them to produce unacceptable representations or derivations for some meanings and then to appeal to a global principle of economy to control this overgeneration. Thus there is an intuition common to many syntactic theories that a given meaning should be expressed in the most economical way, that smaller representations or shorter derivations should be chosen over larger ones.In this paper we explore the conceptual and formal issues of Economy as it has been discussed within the theory of Lexical Functional Grammar. In LFG the metric of Economy is typically formulated in terms of the size of one component of syntactic representation -- the surface constituent structure tree -- but it is often left unstated which trees for a given meaning are to be compared and how they are to be measured. We present a framework within which alternative explicit definitions of Economy can be formulated, and examine some phenomena for which Economy has been offered as an explanation. However, we observe that descriptive devices already available and independently motivated within the traditional LFG formalism can also account for these phenomena directly, without relying on cross-derivational comparisons to compensate for overgeneration. This leads us to question whether Economy is necessary or even useful as a separate principle of grammatical explanation.
Highlights
There is an intuition common to many syntactic theories that a given meaning must be expressed in the most economical way: that only smaller representations or shorter derivations should be classified as well-formed, and larger expressions of the same meaning should be discarded
In this paper we present a formal framework within which alternative explicit definitions of an Economy principle can be examined, cast within the theory of Lexical Functional Grammar
The metric of Economy as discussed in the LFG literature is typically formulated in terms of the size of one component of syntactic representation, the surface constituent structure tree, but it is often left unstated exactly which trees for a given meaning are to be compared and precisely how they are to be measured
Summary
The purpose of a grammatical theory is to specify the mechanisms and principles that can characterize the relations of acceptable sentences in particular languages to the meanings that they express. There is an intuition common to many syntactic theories that a given meaning must be expressed in the most economical way: that only smaller representations or shorter derivations should be classified as well-formed, and larger expressions of the same meaning should be discarded In implementing this intuition, it is sometimes proposed that the simplest and most explanatory way of arranging the formal mechanisms of grammatical description is to allow them to produce unacceptable representations or derivations for some meanings and to appeal to a general grammatical principle to control this overgeneration. Comparisons among grammatical derivations may be important in language acquisition and processing (Kuhn 1999, among many others), and such considerations may provide evidence for processing-based preferences or selection of particular grammatically well-formed structures over others Such preferential mechanisms always choose among grammatically well-formed expressions of the relevant meaning, each of which (according to the Economy principle) is among the smallest for the particular meaning it expresses. The c-structure and simplified f-structure for David yawned is given in (1):
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