Ivan A. Sag – författare

This second edition of "Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction" expands and improves upon a truly unique introductory syntax textbook. Like the first edition its focus is on the development of precisely formulated grammars whose empirical predictions can be directly tested. There is also considerable emphasis on the prediction and evaluation of grammatical hypotheses, as well as on integrating syntactic hypotheses with matters of semantic analysis. The book covers the core areas of English syntax from the last quarter century, including complementation, control, "raising constructions", passives, the auxiliary system, and the analysis of long distance dependency constructions. "Syntactic Theory's" step-by-step introduction to a consistent grammar in these core areas is complemented by extensive problem sets drawing from a variety of languages. The book's theoretical perspective is presented in the context of current models of language processing, and the practical value of the constraint-based, lexicalist grammatical architecture proposed has already been demonstrated in computer language processing applications.This thoroughly reworked second edition includes revised and extended problems sets, updated analyses, additional examples and more detailed exposition throughout.

This book presents the most complete exposition of the theory of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG), introduced in the authors' Information-Based Syntax and Semantics. HPSG provides an integration of key ideas from the various disciplines of cognitive science, drawing on results from diverse approaches to syntactic theory, situation semantics, data type theory, and knowledge representation. The result is a conception of grammar as a set of declarative and order-independent constraints, a conception well suited to modelling human language processing. This self-contained volume demonstrates the applicability of the HPSG approach to a wide range of empirical problems, including a number which have occupied center-stage within syntactic theory for well over twenty years: the control of "understood" subjects, long-distance dependencies conventionally treated in terms of wh-movement, and syntactic constraints on the relationship between various kinds of pronouns and their antecedents. The authors make clear how their approach compares with and improves upon approaches undertaken in other frameworks, including in particular the government-binding theory of Noam Chomsky.

This book presents the most complete exposition of the theory of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG), introduced in the authors' Information-Based Syntax and Semantics. HPSG provides an integration of key ideas from the various disciplines of cognitive science, drawing on results from diverse approaches to syntactic theory, situation semantics, data type theory, and knowledge representation. The result is a conception of grammar as a set of declarative and order-independent constraints, a conception well suited to modelling human language processing. This self-contained volume demonstrates the applicability of the HPSG approach to a wide range of empirical problems, including a number which have occupied center-stage within syntactic theory for well over twenty years: the control of "understood" subjects, long-distance dependencies conventionally treated in terms of wh-movement, and syntactic constraints on the relationship between various kinds of pronouns and their antecedents. The authors make clear how their approach compares with and improves upon approaches undertaken in other frameworks, including in particular the government-binding theory of Noam Chomsky.

Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar provides the definitive exposition of the theory of grammar originally proposed by Gerald Gazdar and developed during half a dozen years' work with his colleagues Ewan Klein, Geoffrey Pullum, and Ivan Sag. This long-awaited book contains both detailed specifications of the theory and extensive illustrations of its power to describe large parts of English grammar. Experts who wish to evaluate the theory and students learning GPSP for the first time will find this book an invaluable guide.The initial chapters lay out the theoretical machinery of GPSP in a readily intelligible way. Combining informal discussion with precise formalization, the authors describe all major aspects of their grammatical system, including a complete theory of syntactic features, phrase structure rules, meta rules, and feature instantiation principles. The book then shows just what a GPSP analysis of English syntax can accomplish. Topics include the internal structure of phrases, unbounded dependency constructions of many varieties, and coordinate conjunction—a construction long considered the sticking point for phrase structure approaches to syntax.The book concludes with a well developed proposal for a model theoretic semantic system to go along with GPSP syntax. Throughout, the authors maintain the highest standards of explicitness and rigor in developing and assessing their grammatical system. Their aim is to provide the best possible test of the hypothesis that syntactic description can be accomplished in a single-level system. And more generally, it is their intention to formulate a grammatical framework in which linguistic universals follow directly from the form of the system and therefore require no explicit statement. Their book sets new methodological standards for work in generative grammar while presenting a grammatical system of extraordinary scope.

A thorough investigation into idioms and their grand meaning, including how best to analyze them.Any theory of idioms should be part and parcel of a general theory of grammar, adding as little machinery to one's overall grammatical approach as possible in describing both the syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasies and regularities of this large class of linguistic expressions.  This volume presents several lexicalist analyses of idioms within the framework of Sign-Based Construction Grammar, reflecting three guiding principles: many but not all idioms are syntactically and semantically compositional, dividing into distinct classes; idioms are analyzable in terms of a suitably rich lexicon and a set of constructions (lexical and syntactic rules) with corresponding meaning representations; and idiomaticity is a gradient phenomenon, exhibiting wide variation in degree of syntactic flexibility and meaning.