This material has been prepared by the students of Group C: MADDI ZUBIAURRE. ANA ÁLVAREZ. TATIANA FAJARDO. BELEN PIKABEA. Mª ANTONIA MORA, ANE GASTELURRUTIA. Based on Wasow 1985 (see transcribed text).
One important similarity is that contemporary syntactic theories share a common ancestry. We have to note the unique position occupied by Noah Chomsky in the field of theoretical linguistics because he revolutionised the area of syntax.
Generalized phrase structure grammar is the product of the fruitful mind of a British linguist named Gerald Gazdar. His starting point is the claim by Chomsky that natural languages exhibit properties in their syntax that resemble context-sensitive languages.
No syntactic dependency need be asssumed although semantically there is a relation between the elements of a sentence. The GPSG is based on the observational adequacy. It has several similarities with Chomsky’s theories: The GPS’s literature exhibits an interest in the mathematical properties of grammar formalism. It is interested in the strings generable by various types of grammars studied with precision. GPSG papers present explicit grammar fragments, which are evaluated on the acceptability of the strings they generate.
All rules in GPSG are made up of three parts:
Like Chomsky’s SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES theory, GPSG has not been tied to any psychological claims and its proponents have been agnostic to the relationship between theories of grammar and language users.
However, the GPSG has its differences with Chomsky’s theories: semantics plays a different role. Whereas Chomsky excluded the study of meaning from the domain of linguists, GPSG’s semantic analyses are such an integral part of the theory as to be inseparable from the syntactic proposals. The intervening decades saw the development of a rigorous formal approach to natural language semantics, explained by Montague and his grammar. Montague was much more interested in the semantics of natural languages than in their syntax. He did, nonetheless, provide a syntax to accompany the rules of interpretation.
Montague regards the study of human languages as part of mathematics and not part of psychology. He has a different view as to the nature of linguistic universals. He is not interested in universals as the result of language acquisition, as in Chomsky. Rather, he regards UNIVERSAL to mean a theory sufficiently general to be capable of encompassing any logically conceivable grammar in the same way that mathematical topology is a universal theory of geometry.
Montague sees a parallelism between syntax and semantics. The rules that produce the syntactic structure of a sentence play a crucial role in the interpretation assigned to that sentence.
The LFG is based on the descriptive adequacy; it has its origin in the concern for the role of grammatical theory in models of processing.
The LFG began in the mid-1970s when its proponents turned to a functionally oriented model because of dissatisfaction with the results produced by the classical transformational grammar paradigm. There are a number of characteristics which place the LFG well within the same general research tradition, however, among them the emphasis on universal constrains on human language(with some constrains serving to mark strings produced by the grammar as ungrammatical), the explanation of child language acquisition as a primary task of a linguistic theory, the modular approach to linguistics(allowing language to be studied free from its communicative context) a distinction between competence and performance(at least at this stage of theory development), and the general research paradigm requiring explicit proposals which must be tested against language data within a frame work of argumentation.
LFG differs radically from classical Traditional Grammar models, however, in that the emphasis is on the function rather than form, and it’s a static system rather than a dymanic one, i.e., there are no transformational rules, so nothing “moves” in the theory. Although there are suggestions that discourse factors play a role in some of the constructions to be accounted for, all indications are that LFG is a sentence-grammar theory. The difference between LFG and Traditional Grammar is the place of grammatical functions. LFG and Traditional Grammar are alike in positing two levels of grammatical representation: semantic interpretation and phonological interpretation.
The LFG is like the theory of the Relational Grammar, and adopts the central tenet of that Relational Grammar. The three theories represented correspond to the three stages of Chomsky’s work. The correspondence is not perfect, but the styles of doing linguistics, the kind of questions asked, and the criteria for evaluating analyses match pretty well. Between GPSG and LFG the focus changed from observational to descriptive to explanatory adequacy.
There are some respects in which the theories under discussion are surprisingly similar. These points of convergence are of special interest because they indicate areas where linguists may have attained some real new insight transcending the more superficial differences among theories. The most obvious similarity is the reduced role of transformations in these theories. By means of transformational rules most relationships among the elements of sentences are represented. The reduced status of transformations in contemporary linguistic theories can be traced back to the observation that a great many of the transformations in the Standard Theory produced outputs that were structurally identical to base-generated trees.
So this fact led Emonds in 1976 to develop a theory in which a large class of transformations was required to be’structure preserving’. But what matters is that this idea is manifested, in a more general form, in the projection principle of GB (government binding).
It also served as an important motivation for eliminating The transformational component altogether in GPSG and LFG. There is a considerable diversity in the mechanisms proposed in the different theories to do what had formerly been done with transformations.
There are significant commonalties But this is most evident in the treatment of unbound dependencies. On the other hand, contemporary theories adopt analyses in which the relationship between ‘fillers’ and ‘gaps’ is mediated by intervening elements. Not only must fillers and gaps be connected by some chain or intermediate elements, but the gap itself must stand in a special relationship with a lexical head close to it.
Another basic idea embodied in these three theories is that clause structure is largely predictable from semantics or predicates. This idea is in the ‘theta criterion’, which says that each argument., has only one and only one theta-role. And each theta-role is assigned to one and only one argument.