Abstract Recent work has shown how basic ideas of the minimalist tradition in transformational syntax can be captured in a simple generative formalism, a “derivational minimalism.” This framework can model “remnant movement” analyses, which yield more complex antecedent-trace relations, suggesting a new and significant sense in which linguistic structures are “chain based.” Michaelis (1998) sho...

• The outlines of an INTEGRATED LANGUAGE THEORY are drawn, with granmmr, semantics and text-theory as components. Problems of machine retrieva! and machine translation are discussed on the basi~f the outlined theory. At present it is unanimously agreed that no computational linguistics • can be developed without an (before hand constructed) eXact language theory. (The computer handling of such ...

Half a century ago, Noam Chomsky introduced the field of linguistics to new mathematical tools drawn largely from recursive function theory. These were exciting tools that imparted mathematical precision, perhaps for the first time in the history of Linguistics, to the enterprise of grammar construction. The cornerstone of Chomsky’s new theoretical edifice, was the grammatical transformation, a...

We propose a methodology for Sanskrit processing by computer. The first layer of this software, which analyses the linear structure of a Sanskrit sentence as a set of possible interpretations under sandhi analysis, is operational. Each interpretation proposes a segmentation of the sentence as a list of tagged segments. The method, which is lexicon directed, is complete if the given (stem forms)...

Some of the assertions made by Chomsky in AspecIs_of the Theory of Syntax are considered. In particular, the notion of a competence' model in linguistics is criticized. Formal postulates for a conceptually-based linguistic theory are presented. This research is supported by Grant PHS MH 06645-07 from the National Institute of Mental Health, and (in part) by the Advanced Research Projects Agency...

The idea that the head of an expression determines the type of that expression is a deeply entrenched axiom of modern linguistics. It is the basis of X-Bar Theory and Dependency Grammar and a key notion underlying Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG). It has a long history dating back at least to Bloomfield’s notion of endocentric construct...

Here is the history of linguistics in one sentence: once upon a time linguists (i.e. syntacticlans) used augmented phrase structure grammars, then they went over to transformational grammars, and then some of them started using augmented phrase structure grammars again, (space for moral~. Whilst we are in this careful scholarly mode, let us do the same service for computational linguistics: onc...

Linguistics and automata theory were at one time tightly knit. Very early on, finite-state processes were used by Markov [35, 27] to predict sequences of vowels and consonants in novels by Pushkin. Shannon [48] extended this idea to predict letter sequences of English words using Markov processes. While many theorems about finite-state acceptors (FSAs) and finite-state transducers (FSTs) were p...

It is possible within Tree Adjoining Grammar to reproduce many of the syntactic analyses originally formulated by linguists in transformational terms. To the extent that these analyses are well-motivated empirically, this fact makes TAG interesting for use in developing computational learning and processing models (Joshi 1990, Frank 1992, Rambow 1994), since the use of other non-transformationa...

One of the primary goals of linguistics is to find a suitable model of natural (human) language. Among the models proposed, one of them, the transformational grammar (abbreviated T-grammar) seems very promising and, in the past decade, has received considerable attention from linguists. At present, there are numerous alternative forms of the model under serious consideration. In fact, there is ...