Abstract

This paper is a reply to Timothy Osborne’s paper Tests for constituents: What they really reveal about the nature of syntactic structure that appeared 2018 in Language under Discussion. This paper discusses how constituent tests work and why it is no problem if they are not applicable. It is argued that Osborne’s claims regarding simplicity of Dependency Grammar (DG) in comparison to Phrase Structure Grammar (PSG) are unwarranted and that DG models that include semantics make use of auxiliary structure that is equivalent to the nodes assumed in PSG. A final section of the paper discusses the general validity of counting nodes for theory evaluation and the assumption of empty elements vs. specialized phrasal rules.

Highlights

  • Timothy Osborne has published a series of papers in which he claimed that Dependency Grammar is simpler than phrase structure grammar and has to be preferred for reasons of parsimony (Osborne & Groß 2016: 132, Osborne 2018: 2)

  • I begin with the Dependency/Phrase Structure Grammar comparison and the claim that grammars without sub-phrasal constituents are simpler (Section 3.1)

  • Groß & Osborne (2009) develop a projective Dependency Grammar, that is, discontinuous constituents are not allowed. Their Dependency Grammar has to license a linguistic object consisting of a ditransitive verb and a dative object (6a) and another one consisting of a ditransitive verb and its accusative object (6b). The assumption of such constituents is standard in HeadDriven Phrase Structure Grammars (HPSG) of German (Pollard 1996, Müller 1996, 2017, Meurers 1999)

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Summary

Introduction

Timothy Osborne has published a series of papers in which he claimed that Dependency Grammar is simpler than phrase structure grammar and has to be preferred for reasons of parsimony (Osborne & Groß 2016: 132, Osborne 2018: 2). One of these papers (Osborne 2018) is a target paper in Language under Discussion. I begin with the Dependency/Phrase Structure Grammar comparison and the claim that grammars without sub-phrasal constituents are simpler (Section 3.1).

Words and constituents and the implications of test applicability
Coordination
Non-maximal constituents
Evaluating theories
Counting nodes and semantics
A B red that you saw yesterday red cars that you saw yesterday
Conclusion
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