Minimal phrase structure: a new formalized theory of phrase structure

John Lowe,Joseph Lovestrand

doi:10.15398/jlm.v8i1.247

Abstract

X' theory was a major milestone in the history of the development of generative grammar.1 It enabled important insights to be made into the phrase structure of human language, but it had a number of weaknesses, and has been essentially replaced in Chomskyan generativism by Bare Phrase Structure (BPS), which assumes fewer theoretical primitives than X0 theory, and also avoids several of the latter’s weaknesses. However, Bare Phrase Structure has not been widely adopted outside the Minimalist Program (MP), rather, X0 theory remains widespread. In this paper, we develop a new, fully formalized approach to phrase structure which incorporates insights and advances from BPS, but does not require the Minimalist-specific assumptions that come with BPS. We formulate our proposal within Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), providing an empirically and theoretically superior model for phrase structure compared with standard versions of X0 theory current in LFG.

Highlights

X theory, first introduced in Chomsky (1970) and elaborated in Jackendoff (1977) among other works, was a major milestone in the history of the development of generative grammar
X theory originated as a means of generalizing over sets of phrase structure rules (PSRs), but in the early 1980s, within the Principles & Parameters model, it led to the abandonment of PSRs as a part of the grammar of individual languages
Bare Phrase Structure is unavoidably associated with a number of assumptions which are theory-specific to the Minimalist Program (MP) – most obviously perhaps, its derivational nature – and for this reason has not been widely adopted outside the MP

Summary

INTRODUCTION

X theory, first introduced in Chomsky (1970) and elaborated in Jackendoff (1977) among other works, was a major milestone in the history of the development of generative grammar. We focus on four main weakness of X theory as utilized within LFG, all of which are evident in (2), a standard LFG constituent structure for the sentence Spot runs: nonbranching dominance chains, optionality of daughters (related to the existence of nonbranching dominance chains, but including heads), redundancy in category labelling, and the need to assume intermediate (X ) nodes as an independent theoretical construct (cf (1a–d)).

Conclusion

A NEW MODEL

Summary

CONCLUSION