Overview

Early formal specifications of natural language syntax were quite closely connected to the notion of abstract machines for computing them. This provided a very natural means of gauging the relative difficulty of processing various constructions, as well as offering some insight into the abstract properties of the human language faculty. More recently, this approach has been superseded by one in which languages are specified in terms of systems of constraints on the structure of their sentences. This has made complexity results difficult to obtain. This book introduces a way of obtaining such results. It presents a natural and quite general means of expressing constraints on the structure of trees and shows that the languages that can be specified by systems of such constraints are exactly those computable by a particular standard class of abstract machines. Thus the difficulty of processing a construction can be reduced to the difficulty of expressing the constraints that specify it. The technique is demonstrated by applying it to a fairly complete treatment of English within the framework of Government and Binding theory, with the result of showing that its complexity is much less than has heretofore been assumed.

Full Product Details

Author:   James Rogers (University of Central Florida)
Publisher:   Centre for the Study of Language & Information
Imprint:   Centre for the Study of Language & Information
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 22.80cm
Weight:   0.450kg
ISBN:  

9781575861371

ISBN 10:   1575861372
Pages:   216
Publication Date:   28 January 1999
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available To Order  
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Table of Contents

1. Language-theoretic complexity in generative grammar; Part I. The Descriptive Complexity of Strongly Content-Free Languages: 2. Introduction to Part I; 3. Trees as elementary structures; 4. L2K,P and SnS; 5. Definability and non-definability in L2K,P; 6. Conclusion of Part I; Part II. The Generative Capacity of GB Theories: 7. Introduction to Part II; 8. The fundamental strucutres of GB theories; 9. GB and non-definablity in L2K, P; 10. Formalizing X-Bar theory; 11. The lexicon, theta theory and case theory; 12. Binding and control; 13. Chains; 14. Reconstruction; 15. Limitations of the interpretation; 16. Conclusion of Part II; A. Index of symbols; B. Index of definitions; Bibliography; Subject index; Name index.

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Author Information

James Rogers is Assistant Professor, School of Computer Science, University of Central Florida.

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