Dear All,
Steve Nicolle recently asked for suggestions for plausible syntactic
theories compatible with RT.
I suggest Kempson, Myer-Viol & Gabbay's Dynamic Syntax (DS). This seems
to be a framework that is tailor-made for RT.
DS is an approach to natural language syntax that is built around the
idea that parsing of natural language sentences is an incremental,
linear left-to-right process.
DS is a grammar formalism that was originally developed as a way to
represent and make more precise the RT claim that lexical expressions
underdetermine their interpretation in context. But the formalism grew
beyond concerns with underspecification, and is intended as a framework
for representing the syntactic properties of natural languages more
generally.
DS may not be as well developed as some of the other grammatical
theories mentioned by Steve Nicolle, such as LFG, GB and P&P. However,
in Kempson, Myer-Viol & Gabbay's recent book Dynamic Syntax (Blackwell
2000), they show how their framework can handle syntactic problems such
as relative clauses, WH-questions, crossover phenomena and quantifier
scope.
There was a review of this book on Linguist List recently by Simon
Musgrave (Linguist List 13.467 Wed Feb 20 2002), which gives a handy
synopsis of the book for those who haven't yet seen a copy.
Regards, Anne.
Anne Bezuidenhout
Department of Philosophy
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
U.S.A
Tel (803) 777-3738
Fax (803) 777-9178
anne1@sc.edu
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