A more extensive discussion of certain of the more technical notions appears in my paper "On Binding" (Chomsky,; henceforth, OB). ...

There is no doubt that the model presented here is incomplete. Many important categories, particularly negation and the adverbials, have been entirely ignored, and the treatment of Tense and the affixes is certainly inadequate. It also remains to be seen how the many constructions that have been ignored here are to be accommodated within the framework that has been outlined. However, the fact that a standard categorial lexicon, plus the four rule schemata, seems to come close to exhaustively specifying the (...) main clause constructions of English, and also seems to explain a number of major constraints on transformations, encourages us to compare the theory with certain alternatives, and to examine its broader implications. (shrink)

This paper presents the Constraint Language for Lambda Structures(CLLS), a first-order language for semantic underspecification thatconservatively extends dominance constraints. It is interpreted overlambda structures, tree-like structures that encode -terms. Based onCLLS, we present an underspecified, uniform analysis of scope,ellipsis, anaphora, and their interactions. CLLS solves a variablecapturing problem that is omnipresent in scope underspecification andcan be processed efficiently.

Because of the ease of their implementation, attribute-value based theories of grammar are becoming increasingly popular in theoretical linguistics as an alternative to transformational accounts and in computational linguistics. This book provides a formal analysis of attribute-value structures, their use in a theory of grammar and the representation of grammatical relations in such theories of grammar. It provides a classical treatment of disjunction and negation, and explores the linguistic implications of different representations of grammatical relations. Mark Johnson is assistant professor (...) in cognitive and linguistic sciences at Brown University. He was a Fairchild postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the 1987-88 academic year. (shrink)

Linear Syntax makes a case for a critical reassessment of the wide-spread view that syntax can be reduced to tree structures. It argues that a crucial part of the description of German clausal syntax should instead be based on concepts that are defined in terms of linear order. By connecting the descriptive tools of modern phrase-structure grammar with traditional descriptive scholarship, Andreas Kathol offers a new perspective on many long-standing problems in syntactic theory.