Abstract
The goal of this paper1 is to illustrate something of the approach to grammatical theory and description made possible by the framework of arc pair grammar (henceforth: APG) as described in Johnson and Postal (to appear). This framework is not easy to discuss currently because its conceptions of the two basic aspects of grammatical theory, the nature of sentences and the nature of grammars, are novel. The APG conception of sentence is an outgrowth of previous ideas in relational grammar. Nonetheless, it contains many unique elements and the previous ideas have been extensively reinterpreted and embedded in a richer and more extensive framework. The APG conception of grammars is entirely novel. It would be misleading to speak about sentences without saying something about grammars, so I shall begin by saying a little about the view of grammar and grammatical rule inherent to the APG framework. Then I illustrate how this conception applies to an actual range of problems. The idea is to show how this framework makes available novel and otherwise unavailable hypotheses about grammatical structure, of a type currently unknown to grammatical discussions.
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Postal, P.M. (1982). Some Arc Pair Grammar Descriptions. In: Jacobson, P., Pullum, G.K. (eds) The Nature of Syntactic Representation. Synthese Language Library, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-7707-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-7707-5_9
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