Abstract
Two kinds of framework for stating grammars of natural languages emerged during the 20th century. Here we call them generative-enumerative syntax (GES)an d model-theoretic syntax (MTS). They are based on very different mathematics. GES developed in the 1950s out of Post’s work on the syntactic side of logic. MTS arose somewhat later out of the semantic side of logic. We identify some distinguishing theoretical features of these frameworks, relating to cardinality of the set of expressions, size of individual expressions, and ‘transderivational constraints’. We then turn to three kinds of linguistic phenomena: partial grammaticality, the syntactic properties of expression fragments, and the fact that the lexicon of any natural language is in constant flux, and conclude that MTS has some major advantages for linguistic description that have been overlooked. We briefly consider the issue of what natural languages in MTS terms, and touch on implications for parsing and acquisition.
Abstract
Early versions of some of this material were presented to the Chicago Linguistic Society, the Ohio State University, and the Australasian Association for Philosophy. We thank John Goldsmith, Lloyd Humberstone, Phokion Kolaitis, Paul Postal, Frank Richter, Jim Rogers, Arnold Zwicky for advice, comments, and assistance. We particularly thank Patrick Davidson, Line Mikkelsen, Glyn Morrill, Chris Potts, and Michael Wescoat for comments on the first draft of this paper. It should not, of course, be assumed that any of these people agree with what we say here; some of them definitely do not.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Backofen, Rolf; James Rogers; and K. Vijay-shanker (1995): A first-order axiomatization of the theory of finite trees. Journal of Logic, Language, and Information 4: 5–39.
Blackburn, Patrick and Claire Gardent (1995): A specification language for lexical functional grammars. Proceedings of the 7th EACL, 39–44. European Association for Computational Linguistics.
Blackburn, Patrick, Claire Gardent, and Wilfried Meyer-Viol (1993): Talking about trees. Proceedings of the 1993 Meeting of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 21–29.
Blackburn, Patrick and Wilfried Meyer-Viol (1997): Modal logic and modeltheoretic syntax. In M. de Rijke (ed.), Advances in Intensional Logic, 29–60. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
Bresnan, Joan and Ronald M. Kaplan (1982): Introduction: grammars as mental representations of language. In The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, ed. by Joan Bresnan, xvii–lii. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Buttke, Kurt (1969): Gesetzmässigkeiten der Wortfolge im Russischen. Halle: Max Niemeyer.
Chomsky, Noam (1955): The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. Unpublished dittograph, MIT. Published in slightly revised form by Plenum, New York, 1975.
Chomsky, Noam (1957): Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Chomsky, Noam (1959): On certain formal properties of grammars. Information and Control 2 (1959) 137–167.
Chomsky, Noam (1961): Some methodological remarks on generative grammar. Word 17, 219–239. Section 5 republished as ‘Degrees of grammaticalness’ in Fodor and Katz (1964), 384–389.
Chomsky, Noam (1964): Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. The Hague: Mouton. Page reference to reprinting in Fodor and Katz, eds.
Chomsky, Noam (1986): Knowledge of Language: Its Origins, Nature, and Use. New York: Praeger.
Chomsky, Noam (1995): The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dixon, Robert W. (1963): Linguistic Science and Logic. The Hague: Mouton.
Ebbinghaus, Heinz-Dieter, and Jorg Flum (1999): Finite Model Theory. Second edition. Berlin: Springer.
Emonds, Joseph E. (1976): A Transformational Approach to English Syntax. New York: Academic Press.
Evans, Gareth (1981): Reply: syntactic theory and tacit knowledge. In S. H. Holtzman and C. M. Leich (eds.), Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, 118–137. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Fillmore, Charles W. and Paul Kay (1999) Grammat ical constructions and linguistic generalizations: The What’s X doing Y? construction. Language 75: 1–33.
Fodor, Jerry A. and Jerrold J. Katz, eds. (1964): The Structure of Language: Readings in the Philosophy of Language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Gazdar, Gerald; Ewan Klein; Geoffrey K. Pullum; and Ivan A. Sag (1985): Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. Oxford: Basil Blackwell; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gazdar, Gerald; Geoffrey K. Pullum; Bob Carpenter; Ewan Klein; Thomas E. Hukari; and Robert D. Levine (1988): Category structures. Computational Linguistics 14: 1–19.
Gold, E. Mark (1967): Language identification in the limit. Information and Control 10: 441–474.
Harris, Zellig S. (1968): Mathematical Structures of Language (Interscience Tracts in Pure and Applied Mathematics, 21). New York: Interscience Publishers.
Hetzron, Robert (1972): Phonology in syntax. Journal of Linguistics 8, 251–265.
Hill, Archibald A. (1961): Grammaticality. Word 17, 1–10.
Hockett, Charles F. (1955): A Manual of Phonology. Baltimore, MD: Waverly Press.
Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey K. Pullum (forthcoming): The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hughes, G. E. and M. J. Cresswell (1984): A Companion to Modal Logic. London: Methuen.
Immerman, Neil (1998): Descriptive Complexity. Berlin: Springer, 1998.
Jackendoff, Ray S. (1977): X̄ Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Johnson, David E., and Paul M. Postal (1980): Arc Pair Grammar. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Joshi, Aravind (1987): An introduction to tree adjoining grammars. In Alexis Manaster-Ramer (ed.), Mathematics of Language, 87–114. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Keenan, Edward L. and Edward Stabler (1996): Abstract syntax. In Configurations: Essays on Structure and Interpretation, ed. by Anna-Maria Di Sciullo (ed.), 329–344. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Keller, Frank (1998): Gradient grammaticality as an effect of selective constraint re-ranking. In M. Catherine Gruber, Derrick Higgins, Kenneth S. Olson, and Tamra Wysocki, eds., Papers from the 34th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society; Vol. 2: The Panels, 95–109. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
[2000]Keller, Frank (2000): Gradience in Grammar: Experimental and Computational Aspects of Degrees of Grammaticality. PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh.
Kempson, Ruth; Wilfried Meyer-Viol; and Dov Gabbay (2001): Dynamic Syntax: The Flow of Language Understanding. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
King, Paul John (1999): Towards truth in head-driven phrase structure grammar. Bericht Nr. 132, Arbeitspapiere des Sonderforschungsbereich 340, Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft, Eberhard-Karls-Universität, Tübingen.
Kornai, Andràs and Geoffrey K. Pullum (1990): The X-bar theory of phrase structure. Language 66: 24–50.
Kracht, Marcus (1989): On the logic of category definitions. Computational Linguistics 15: 111–113.
Kracht, Marcus (1993): Syntactic codes and grammar refinement. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 4: 41–60.
Kracht, Marcus (2001): Logic and syntax: a personal view. In Michael Zhakharyaschev, Krister Segerberg, Maarten de Rijke and Heinrich Wansing (eds.), Advances in Modal Logic 2. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Lakoff, George (1971): On generative semantics. In Danny D. Steinberg and Leon A. Jakobovitz (eds.), Semantics: An Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology, 232–296. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
Langendoen, Terry and Paul M. Postal (1984): The Vastness of Natural Languages. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Lasnik, Howard (2000): Syntactic Structures Revisited: Contemporary Lectures on Classic Transformational Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Miller, Philip, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Arnold M. Zwicky (1997): The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax: Four apparent counterexamples from French. Journal of Linguistics 33: 67–90.
Perlmutter, David M. (1971): Deep and Surface Structure Constraints in Syntax. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston.
Pollard, Carl and Ivan A. Sag (1994): Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Pollard, Carl (1999): Strong generative capacity in HPSG. In Gert Webelhuth, Jean-Pierre Koenig, and Andreas Kathol (eds.), Lexical and Constructional Aspects of Linguistic Explanation, 281–297. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Post, Emil (1943): Formal reductions of the general combinatory decision problem. American Journal of Mathematics 65 (1943) 197–215.
Post, Emil (1944): Recursively enumerable sets of positive integers and their decision problems. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 50 (1944) 284–316.
Prince, Alan and Paul Smolensky (1993): Optimality Theory (Technical Report RuCCS TR-2, Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science). Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University.
Pullum, Geoffrey K. and Barbara C. Scholz (1997): Theoretical linguistics and the ontology of linguistic structure. In 1997 Yearbook of the Linguistic Association of Finland, 25–47. Turku: Linguistic Association of Finland.
Pullum, Geoffrey K. and Barbara C. Scholz (forthcoming): Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments. The Linguistic Review, in press.
Rogers, James (1996): A model-theoretic framework for theories of syntax. In 34th Annual Meeting of the Assocation for Computational Linguistics: Proceedings of the Conference, 10–16. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.
Rogers, James (1997): “Grammarless” phrase structure grammar. Linguistics and Philosophy 20: 721–746.
Rogers, James (1998): A Descriptive Approach to Language-Theoretic Complexity. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Rogers, James (1999): The descriptive complexity of generalized local sets. In Hans-Peter Kolb and Uwe Mönnich (eds.), The Mathematics of Syntactic Structure: Trees and their Logics, (Studies in Generative Grammar, 44), 21–40. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Sag, Ivan A.; Gerald Gazdar; Thomas Wasow; and Stephen Weisler (1985): Coordination and how to distinguish categories. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 3: 117–171.
Sag, Ivan A. and Thomas Wasow (1999): Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Schütze, Carson (1996): The Empirical Base of Linguistics: Grammaticality Judgments and Linguistic Methodology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Thomas, Simon (1986): Theories with finitely many models. Journal of Symbolic Logic 51: 374–376.
Thomas, Wolfgang (1990): Automata on infinite objects. In J. van Leeuwen (ed.), Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, 135–191. New York: Elsevier Science.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Pullum, G.K., Scholz, B.C. (2001). On the Distinction between Model-Theoretic and Generative-Enumerative Syntactic Frameworks. In: de Groote, P., Morrill, G., Retoré, C. (eds) Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics. LACL 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2099. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48199-0_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48199-0_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42273-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48199-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive