Dynamic Syntax

Ruth Kempson is Leverhulme Research Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Philosophy, King's College London. She is editor of Mental Representations (1988) and Deduction and Language (1995). Wilfried Meyer-Viol is Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at King's College London. He is a logician with a background in psychology who has published on cognitive psychology and on classical, intuitionistic and modal logic.Dov Gabbay is Professor of Computer Science at King's College London. He is one of the world's foremost authorities on non-classical logics and their applications in computing. He has published over 170 papers and books on this subject, and initiated several currently active research areas in logic and computation.

"The framework of Dynamic Syntax is the most exciting new development in syntactic theory to emerge in recent years. As well as providing a full introduction to the framework, this book provides in-depth discussions of relative clause constructions, wh questions and crossover phenomena in a range of languages including English, Arabic and Japanese. This book is likely to become a classic and will be of interest to all those interested in the syntactic modelling of natural languages." Ronnie Cann, University of Edinburgh"This is an important book and ... the ideas presented in it deserve the close attention of syntacticians and semanticists." Linguist List

• Preface1 Towards a Syntactic Model of Interpretation 11.1 Natural Language as a Formal Language? 11.2 Underspecification in Language Processing 31.3 The Representational Theory of Mind 71.4 Pronominal Anaphora: Semantic Problems 91.4.1 The Problem of Multiple Ambiguity 91.4.2 The Problem of Uniqueness 121.4.3 The Problem of Indirect Reference 131.4.4 Quantification 151.4.5 Syntactic Processes of Anaphora 151.5 The Anaphora Solution – Towards a Representational Account 162 The General Framework 182.1 A Preliminary Sketch 192.2 The Data Structures of the Parsing Model 272.2.1 Atomic Formulae 312.2.2 Tree Modalities 362.2.3 Basic Tree Structures 392.2.4 Partial Tree Structures 412.2.5 Requirements 422.2.6 Descriptions of Tree Structures 493 The Dynamics of Tree Building 553.1 The Parsing Process – A Sketch 563.1.1 A Basic Example 563.1.2 A Left-Dislocation Example 643.1.3 Verb-final Languages and the Grammar-parser Problem 673.2 The Parsing Process Defined 763.2.1 Computational Rules 803.2.2 Lexical Transitions 893.2.3 Pragmatic Actions and Lexical Constraints 953.3 Summary 984 Linked Tree Structures 1034.1 Relative Clauses – Preliminaries 1034.1.1 The LINK Relation 1044.1.2 The Data Reviewed 1054.2 The Analysis – A Sketch for English 1094.2.1 Defining Linked Tree Structures 1104.2.2 Relativizers Annotating Unfixed Nodes 1114.3 Relatives: Towards a Dynamic Typology 1214.3.1 Relativizers Projecting a Requirement 1214.3.2 Variation in Locality 1284.3.3 Topic Structures and Relatives 1304.3.4 Variation in Order – Head-Final Relatives 1334.3.5 Head-internal Relatives 1394.3.6 The Potential for Lexical Variation 1424.4 Genitive Constructions as LINK Structures 1444.5 Summary 1485 Wh Questions: A General Perspective 1505.1 Introduction 1505.2 The Semantic Diversity of wh Questions 1515.2.1 Scopal Properties of wh Expressions 1545.3 Wh initial vs -in-situ Structures 1565.3.1 Wh-in-situ Structures 1585.3.2 Wh-in-situ from a Dynamic Perspective 1615.4 Expletive wh Structures 1635.4.1 Partial Movement 1635.4.2 Partial Movement as a Reflex of a Requirement 1695.5 Wh Expressions and Scope Effects 1866. Crossover Phenomena 1906.1 Crossover – The Problem 1906.2 Crossover – The Dynamic Account 1966.2.1 Crossover in Relatives 1966.2.2 Crossover Phenomena in Questions 2136.3 Summary 2217 Quantification Preliminaries 2237.1 Introduction 2237.2 Scope Effects and Indefinites 2247.3 Quantification 2317.3.1 Quantified NPs 2347.3.2 Scope 2397.3.3 Term Reconstructions 2457.3.4 Applications – E-type Anaphora 2498 Reflections on Language Design 2538.1 The Overall Perspective 2538.2 Underspecification and the Formal Language Metaphor 2598.2.1 English is not a Formal Language 2608.3 Well-formedness and Availability of Interpretations 2628.4 Universals and Language Variation 2648.5 On Knowledge of Language 2669 The Formal Framework 2689.1 Introduction 2689.2 Declarative Structure 2739.2.1 Feature-decorated Tree Construction 2739.2.2 Goal directedness 2919.2.3 The Structure of Goal-directed Partial Tree Models 2979.2.4 Tree Descriptions 3029.3 Procedural Structure 3079.3.1 Actions over Goal-directed Partial Tree Models 3089.3.2 Natural Languages 3129.4 Axioms 3179.4.1 Finite Binary trees 3179.4.2 Partial Trees 3199.4.3 Requirements 3209.4.4 Actions 3219.4.5 Partial Order 3229.4.6 Logical Forms 3229.4.7 Computational Rules 3239.4.8 Update Actions 3259.4.9 Pragmatic Actions 325Bibliography 326General Index 338Symbol Index 347