This short (two-page) entry was written in October 2000 for the second edition of the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (Oxford University Press).
This theory of language structure is called 'Word Grammar' (WG) because of the central role of the word as the only unit of syntax. Syntactic structure is based, not on the part-whole relationships of phrase structure, but on the dependencies between pairs of words; so WG is part of the very old linguistic tradition of dependency grammar. ... Another basic tenet of WG is the logic of multiple default inheritance, which in turn is based on the elementary relation called 'isa' which underlies classificatory hierarchies. Inheritance is the mechanism which allows generalisation, and is equivalent to 'schematicity' in other cognitive theories. ... The example illustrates the WG view that language is a network. This view is typical of 'cognitive' theories of language which emphasise the continuities between language and non-linguistic knowledge, and contrasts with the view that language is a distinct module of the mind.