Abstract
This chapter presents basic criteria of adequacy for grammars. Section 2.1 explains the empirical limitations of constituent-structure analysis. Section 2.2 presents the basic theory of natural-language communication. Section 2.3 illustrates the process of understanding a sentence with a simple formal example. Section 2.4 presents the Criteria of Psychological Well-Foundedness. Section 2.5 shows that grammars within current paradigms of linguistic analysis are not psychologically well-founded.
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References
Bloomfield (1933), Wells (1947), Harris (1951), Bloch (1953). For a more recent discussion of syntactic hierarchies from the viewpoint of tagmemic grammar see Longacre (1983), pp. 273 f.
“In short, the approach to the analysis of grammaticalness suggested here in terms of a finite state Markov process that produces sentences from left to right, appears to lead to a dead end.” Chomsky (1957), p. 24.
Hausser (1979b,c).
McDonald et al. (1987) use the term “relevant portion of the situation” or RPS (op. cit., p. 161). We avoid the term “situation” because it is biased toward a description of the external world, rather than certain internal states of the speaker or the hearer. For a related discussion see Section 12.5.
STAR-point stands for the Space-Time-Agent-Recipient point of origin of a sign.
See pp. 103 f. of Anderson and Bower (1980).
E.g., Quine (1960).
See Section 11.2 for further discussion.
The exact definitions of the intensional logic used in 2.3.2 are explicitly given in Section 15.5.
Much of the discussion of semantics and pragmatics in Chapters 11–15 will be formulated in model-theoretic terms.
As, for example, in Sowa (1984), p. 302.
For reasons explained in Section 3.4, semantic frame-names like FIDO-l_l_l consist of two parts, namely the base, e.g., FIDO, and the index, e.g., -1_1_1.
Since the frame-theoretic icon is build simultaneously with the left-associative derivation (cf. Section 3.3), pragmatic interpretation may commence during the syntactico/semantic analysis.
I.e., a sequence of word forms, such as Fido found a bone.
A methodological desideratum inherited from generative grammar in general. See Section 6.1.
That the hearer is often able to guess the continuation, enabling him to complete the sentence before the speaker, provides additional support to a linear (or left-associative) approach to syntax.
A limiting case of a continuation is the speaker’s decision to break off and start over (‘false starts’). “Speech is irreversible. That is its fatality. What has been said cannot be unsaid, except by adding to it: to correct here, is, oddly enough, to continue.” (R. Barthes, 1986, p. 76).
The bidirectional surface-meaning mapping and the time-linear derivation order constitute necessary, but not sufficient, I/O-conditions of language use. That is, while no natural-language use will violate these conditions, there may well be further constraints.
Only clauses 2 and 3 of the Criteria of Procedural Adequacy are relevant for I/O-equivalence with the speaker-hearer. Clause 1 is not specifically excluded, however, because the explicit formal statement of the grammatical rules is a methodological precondition for evaluating clauses 2 and 3 in a meaningful way.
The formalism of C-grammar is based on Lesnieswki (1929) and Ajdukiewicz (1935). This formalism was first applied to the description of natural language by Bar-Hillel (1953).
Montague (1974), Chapter 8, henceforth “PTQ.”
Hausser (1984a).
The formalism of PS-grammar is based on the rewriting systems of Post (1936). This formalism was first applied to the description of natural language by Chomsky (1957).
Chomsky (1965).
Chomsky (1981).
Bresnan (1984).
Gazdar et al. (1985).
R and lambda-reduction are many-one functions, and their inverses one-many relations. See Hausser (1984a), chapters 2 and 4, for further discussion.
The same holds for the derivational structure of the current competitors of GB.
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Hausser, R. (1989). Grammar and Interpretation. In: Computation of Language. Symbolic Computation. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-74564-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-74564-5_3
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