Phrase Structure Grammar: the next generation

Abstract

Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar represents the fruits of a decade of research in feature-based syntactic theory. It belongs to a select company of linguistic monographs which are both monumental and intensely provocative, including among their number Chomsky (I965, I98I), Ross (1967) and Gazdar et al. (I985). Like other works in this elite group, Pollard & Sag's book addresses simultaneously a wide variety of grammatical phenomena and a set of fundamental questions about the nature of syntactic representations which have shaped the direction of theoretical work by investigators throughout the field, leading to hundreds of papers and new hypotheses, including, inevitably, challenges and counterproposals to the analyses proposed by the authors. There is, in addition, a second domain in which Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar has had major impact in linguistics the field of computational implementations, where the framework proposed by the authors that gives their book its name has rapidly become the theory of choice, a fact particularly evident in the European computational scene. The book's organization can be understood in terms of the syntax/ semantics dichotomy, and, within the syntactic discussion that takes up the first half of the book, the application of the technology outlined in the first chapter to progressively less local grammatical dependencies, insofar as locality was understood in the early generative era. Thus, after the first chapter, in which the feature-logic formalism of the theory is lightly sketched and the major constraints which the theory comprises are stated, or at least alluded to, we are given in chapter 2 a discussion of agreement. Chapter 3 is explicitly devoted to issues of subcategorization and complementation.