Steedman M. The Syntactic Process

MIT Press, 2000. — 363 p.This book attempts to bring together in a single framework and a uniform notation a number of strands in a project that my colleagues and I have been pursuing over several years. The purpose of the research has been to develop a principled theory of natural grammar more directly compatible on the one hand with certain syntactic phenomena that flagrantly disrupt order and constituency, including coordination, extraction, and intonational phrasing, and on the other with psychological and computational mechanisms that can map such surface forms onto interpretable meaning representations. The book follows other computational approaches in claiming that syntactic structure is merely the characterization of the process of constructing a logical form, rather than a representational level of structure that actually needs to be built hence its title. Syntactic structure so understood can depart quite radically from the standard notions of surface constituency, offering in return a simpler and more explanatory linguistic theory of these phenomena.
The work covers topics in formal linguistics, intonational phonology, computational linguistics, and experimental psycholinguistics, many of which have been presented previously in different frameworks and addressed to diverse specialized audiences. In every case the early results have been extended and reworked here for the present purpose, which is to present them as a whole in a form accessible to the general reader starting from any one of those fields.
This research has had the goal defined in Chomsky's earliest work, of formalizing an explanatory theory of linguistic form. Such a theory must do more than just capture the grammars of various languages, via a finite generative specification of all and only the sentence-meaning pairs that each allows. It must also explain why all such grammars appear to be drawn from a curiously restricted set subject to universal constraints.Grammar and Information Structure
Rules, Constituents, and Fragments
Intuitive Basis of Combinatory Categorial Grammars
Explaining Constraints on Natural Grammar
Structure and Intonation
Coordination and Word Order
Cross-Serial Dependencies in Dutch
Gapping and the Order of Constituents
Computation and Performance
Combinators and Grammars
Processing in Context
The Syntactic Interface