Notes on computational linguistics.pdf - UCLA Department of ...

Stabler - Lx 185/209 2003
10 Towards standard transformational grammar
In the previous section the grammars had only:
• selection
• phrasal movement
It is surprisingly easy to modify the grammar to add a couple of the other common structure building options:
• head movement to the left or the right
• affix hopping to the left or the right
• adjunction on the left or the right
Many linguists doubt that all these mechanisms are needed, but the various proposals for unifying them are
controversial. Fortunately for us, it turns out that all of them can be handled as small variations on the devices
of the “minimalist” framework. Consequently, we will be able to get quite close to the processing problems
posed by grammars of the sort given by introductory texts on transformational grammar!
10.1 Review: phrasal movement
A simple approach to wh-movement allows us to derive simple sentences and wh-questions like the following,
in an artificial Subject-Object-Verb language with no verbal inflections:
(1) the king the pie eat
(2) which pie the king eat
Linguists have proposed that not only is the question formed by moving the wh determiner phrase (DP) [which
pie] from object position to the front, but in all clauses the pronounced DPs move to case positions, where
transitive verbs assign case to their objects (“Burzio’s generalization”). So then the clauses above get depictions
rather like this, indicating movements by leaving coindexed “traces” (t) behind:
CP
D
the
DP2
CP
C TP
NP
king
t2
T’
T vP
DP
DP1
D
the
v’
v VP
NP
pie
V
eat
VP
t1
DP
D
DP1
which
As indicated by coindexing, in the tree on the left, there are two movements, while the tree on the right has
three movements because [which pie] moves twice: once to a case position, and then to the front, wh-question
position. The sequences of coindexed constituents are sometimes called “chains.”
Notice that if we could move eat from its V position in these trees to the v position, we would have the
English word order. In fact, we will do this, but first let’s recall how this non-English word order can be derived
with the mechanisms we already have.
These expressions above can be defined by an MG with the following 10 lexical items (writing ɛ for the
empty string, and using k for the abstract “case” feature):
198
NP
pie
D
the
DP2
C’
C TP
NP
king
t2
T’
T vP
DP
DP1
t1
v’
v VP
V
eat
VP
t1
DP