Studies in Contemporary Phrase Structure Grammar

This book explores a variety of central issues in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), a theory of syntactic representation which is becoming increasingly dominant, particularly in natural language computation. It considers problematic phenomena in German, Japanese and English and suggests extensions of, and revisions to, the picture of HPSG.

This book explores a wide variety of theoretically central issues in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), a major theory of syntactic representation, particularly in the domain of natural language computation. HPSG is a strongly lexicon-driven theory, like several others on the scene, but unlike the others it also relies heavily on an explicit assignment of linguistic objects to membership in a hierarchically organised network of types, where constraints associated with any given type are inherited by all of its subtypes. This theoretical architecture allows HPSG considerable flexibility within the confines of a highly restrictive, mathematically explicit formalism, requiring no derivational machinery and invoking only a single level of syntactic representation. The separate chapters consider a variety of problematic phenomena in German, Japanese and English and suggest important extensions of, and revisions to, the picture of HPSG.