Dependency Structures From Syntax To Discourse

This book combines theoretical and experimental aspects of the establishment of dependency. It provides an account of dependency relations by focusing on the representation and interpretation of referentially dependent elements, particularly regular reflexives, logophors, and pronouns. First, the establishment of dependency is discussed within a model of syntax—discourse correspondences that predicts an economy-based dependency hierarchy contingent on the level of representation at which the dependency is formed as well as the internal structure of the dependent element and its antecedent. Secondly, the model’s predictions are substantiated by a series of experimental studies (conducted in English and Dutch) providing evidence from three sources of online sentence comprehension: reaction time studies, Broca’s aphasia patient studies, and event-related brain potential studies. The findings show that dependencies are established at distinct levels of linguistic encoding (i.e. syntax or discourse) determined by the presence or absence of coargumenthood and the representation of the dependency-forming elements.

"Based on the large corpora of journalistic English, this title examines dependency relations and related properties at both syntactic and discourse levels, seeking to unravel the language patterns of real-life usage. With a focus on rank-frequency distribution, the author investigates the distribution of linguistic properties/units from the perspectives of properties, motifs and sequencings. At the syntactic level, the book analyses the following three dimensions: various combinations of a complete dependency structure, valency and dependency distance. At the discourse level, it proves that the elements can also form dependency relations by exploring 1) the rank-frequency distribution of Rhetorical Structure Theory relations, their motifs, discourse valency and discourse dependency distance; 2) whether there is top-down organization or an inverted pyramid structure at all the three discourse levels and 3) whether discourse dependency distances and valencies are lawfully distributed, following the same distribution patterns as those at the syntactic level. This book will be of great value for scholars and students of quantitative linguistics and computational linguistics and its practical insights will also benefit professionals of language teaching and journalistic writing"--

Based on the large corpora of journalistic English, this title examines dependency relations and related properties at both syntactic and discourse levels, seeking to unravel the language patterns of real-life usage. With a focus on rank-frequency distribution, the author investigates the distribution of linguistic properties/units from the perspectives of properties, motifs and sequencings. At the syntactic level, the book analyses the following three dimensions: various combinations of a complete dependency structure, valency and dependency distance. At the discourse level, it proves that the elements can also form dependency relations by exploring (1) the rank-frequency distribution of Rhetorical Structure Theory relations, their motifs, discourse valency and discourse dependency distance; (2) whether there is top-down organisation or an inverted pyramid structure at all the three discourse levels; and (3) whether discourse dependency distances and valencies are lawfully distributed, following the same distribution patterns as those at the syntactic level. This book will be of great value for scholars and students of quantitative linguistics and computational linguistics and its practical insights will also benefit professionals of language teaching and journalistic writing.

This introduction to the role of information structure in grammar discusses a wide range of phenomena on the syntax-information structure interface. It examines theories of information structure and considers their effectiveness in explaining whether and how information structure maps onto syntax in discourse. Professor Erteschik-Shir begins by discussing the basic notions and properties of information structure, such as topic and focus, and considers their properties from different theoretical perspectives. She covers definitions of topic and focus, architectures of grammar, information structure, word order, the interface between lexicon and information structure, and cognitive aspects of information structure. In her balanced and readable account, the author critically compares the effectiveness of different theoretical approaches and assesses the value of insights drawn from work in processing and on language acquisition, variation, and universals. This book will appeal to graduate students of syntax and semantics in departments of linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science.

This volume offers the reader a unique possibility to obtain a concise introduction to dependency linguistics and to learn about the current state of the art in the field. It unites the revised and extended versions of the linguistically-oriented papers to the First International Conference on Dependency Linguistics held in Barcelona. The contributions range from the discussion of definitional challenges of dependency at different levels of the linguistic model, its role beyond the classical grammatical description, and its annotation in dependency treebanks to concrete analyses of various cross-linguistic phenomena of syntax in its interplay with phonetics, morphology, and semantics, including phenomena for which classical simple phrase-structure based models have proven to be unsatisfactory. The volume will be thus of interest to both experts and newcomers to the field of dependency linguistics and its computational applications.

This work presents the first sustained examination of Dependency Syntax. In clear and stimulating analyses Mel'cuk promotes syntactic description in terms of dependency rather than in terms of more familiar phrase-structure. The notions of dependency relations and dependency structure are introduced and substantiated, and the advantages of dependency representation are demonstrated by applying it to a number of popular linguistic problems, e.g. grammatical subject and ergative construction. A wide array of linguistic data is used - the well-known (Dyirbal), the less known (Lezgian), and the more recent (Alutor). Several "exotic" cases of Russian are discussed to show how dependency can be used to solve difficult technical problems. The book is not only formal and rigorous, but also strongly theory-oriented and data-based. Special attention is paid to linguistic terminology, specifically to its logical consistency. The dependency formalism is presented within the framework of a new semantics-oriented general linguistic theory, Meaning-Text theory.

This book combines theoretical and experimental aspects of the establishment of dependency. It provides an account of dependency relations by focusing on the representation and interpretation of referentially dependent elements, particularly regular reflexives, logophors, and pronouns. First, the establishment of dependency is discussed within a model of syntax—discourse correspondences that predicts an economy-based dependency hierarchy contingent on the level of representation at which the dependency is formed as well as the internal structure of the dependent element and its antecedent. Secondly, the model's predictions are substantiated by a series of experimental studies (conducted in English and Dutch) providing evidence from three sources of online sentence comprehension: reaction time studies, Broca's aphasia patient studies, and event-related brain potential studies. The findings show that dependencies are established at distinct levels of linguistic encoding (i.e. syntax or discourse) determined by the presence or absence of coargumenthood and the representation of the dependency-forming elements.

This survey explores interactions between syntax and discourse, through a case study of patterns of extraction from coordinate structures. The theoretical breadth of the volume makes it the most complete account of extraction from coordinate structures to date: at first glance, it appears to be a syntactic matter, but the survey raises theoretical and empirical questions not just for syntax, but also across semantics, pragmatics, and discourse structure. Rather than promoting a single analysis, Daniel Altshuler and Robert Truswell outline reasonable hypotheses that allow theoretical conclusions to be deducted from empirical facts. The theoretical conclusions show that coordinate structures have the potential to discriminate between current syntactic theories, and to inform work on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. In many cases, however, the necessary empirical work has not yet been carried out, and too much of the literature revolves around the same handful of primarily English examples. The volume offers a starting point for further research on extraction from coordinate structures, particularly in understudied languages, and provides a guide to how to tease out the theoretical implications of empirical findings.